Search underway for suspects in Alabama mass shooting

This image provided by WBMA shows police and emergency vehicles in the entertainment district after a shooting in Birmingham, Ala., Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024. (Bill Castle/WBMA via AP)

Authorities have reported no arrests after a weekend mass shooting killed four people and left 17 others injured in what police described as a targeted “hit” by multiple shooters who opened fire outside a popular Alabama nightspot.

The shooting late Saturday in the popular Five Points South entertainment district of Birmingham rocked an area of restaurants and bars that is often bustling on weekend nights.

The mass shooting, one of several this year in the city, unnerved residents and left officials at home and beyond pleading for help to both solve the crime and address the broader problem of gun violence.

“The priority is to find these shooters and get them off our streets,” Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin said a day after the shooting.

The mayor planned a morning news conference Monday to provide updates.

This image provided by WBMA shows bystanders near the scene of a shooting in Birmingham, Ala., Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024. (Bill Castle/WBMA via AP)

The shooting occurred on the sidewalk and street outside Hush, a lounge in the entertainment district, where blood stains were still visible on the sidewalk outside the venue on Sunday morning.

Police Chief Scott Thurmond said authorities believe the shooting targeted one of the people who was killed, possibly in a murder-for-hire. A vehicle pulled up and “multiple shooters” got out and began firing, then fled, he said.

“We believe that there was a ‘hit,’ if you will, on that particular person,” Thurmond said.

Police said about 100 shell casings were recovered. Thurmond said that law enforcement was working to determine what weapons were used, but that they believe some of the gunfire was “fully automatic.” Investigators also were trying to determine whether anyone fired back, creating crossfire.

In a statement late Sunday, police said the shooters are believed to have used “machine gun conversion devices” that make semiautomatic weapons fire more rapidly.

This image provided by WBMA shows police tape near the scene of a shooting in Birmingham, Ala., Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024. (Bill Castle/WBMA via AP)

Some surviving victims critically injured

Officers found two men and a woman on a sidewalk with gunshot wounds, and they were pronounced dead there. An additional male gunshot victim was pronounced dead at a hospital, according to police.

Police identified the three victims found on the sidewalk as Anitra Holloman, 21, of the Birmingham suburb of Bessemer, Tahj Booker, 27, of Birmingham, and Carlos McCain, 27, of Birmingham. The fourth victim was pending identification.

By the early hours of Sunday, victims began showing up at hospitals, and police identified 17 people with injuries, some of them life-threatening.

Four of the surviving victims, in conditions ranging from good to critical, were being treated at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital on Sunday afternoon, according to hospital spokesperson Alicia Rohan.

A popular nightspot rocked by gunfire

A firefighter cleans blood stains off the sidewalk outside a nightclub in Birmingham, Ala. on Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024, after a mass shooting took place. (AP Photo/Kim Chandler)

The area of Birmingham where the gunfire erupted is popular with young adults because of its proximity to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, restaurants and bars.

The shooting was the nation’s 31st mass killing of 2024, of which 23 were shootings, according to James Alan Fox, a criminologist and professor at Northeastern University, who oversees a mass killings database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with the university.

Three of the nation’s 23 mass shootings this year were in Birmingham, including two earlier quadruple homicides.

Another shooting. Is it related?

Three more people were shot, one fatally, elsewhere in Birmingham on Sunday night, and police said they were looking into whether it was connected to the shooting a day earlier, AL.com reported.

A man and woman were found unresponsive and taken to a hospital, where the man died, police said. The woman had life-threatening injuries. Police were working to confirm whether a third gunshot victim who arrived at a hospital in a private vehicle was shot in the same incident, Officer Truman Fitzgerald said.

Mayor pleads for a solution to gun violence

Woodfin expressed frustration at what he described as an epidemic of gun violence in America and the city.

“We find ourselves in 2024, where gun violence is at an epidemic level, an epidemic crisis in our country. And the city of Birmingham, unfortunately, finds itself at the tip of that spear,” he said.