Between Thursday night and Saturday evening, I came across six shootings connected to high school football games around the country, and those are only the ones that happened to land in front of me. Let me walk through them in the order they happened, because the sequence is almost as damning as the details.
It started Thursday night outside Cupples Stadium on Pittsburgh’s South Side, where a big crowd had spilled onto Carson Street and a couple of fights broke out. Gunshots followed, close enough to a group of officers that Chief Jason Lando said they were only steps from the shooter. A 16-year-old girl, a 16-year-old boy, and an 18-year-old were hit, and all three are in stable condition. Police took one person in for questioning and recovered a firearm near the scene, while Pittsburgh Public Schools announced that spectators at Friday’s games must be 18 or older and that nobody is allowed to hang around outside the stadium. I’m curious what exactly the new rules are supposed to fix.
Friday brought four more. In Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a fight outside Aerie Stadium escalated into gunfire around 8:40 p.m., with roughly twelve minutes left in the homecoming game against Minnetonka. Two teenagers, 17 and 18, were wounded, and the school says neither of them attends either school involved. Police believe the shooting was gang-related, which is a belief and not a finding. A livestream caught fans and players running off the field while the announcer told everyone to evacuate. The homecoming dance has been canceled, and the rest of the game is supposed to resume today.
Down in Ocoee, Florida, fights broke out in the parking lot after the game between Jones and Ocoee, and at about 9:24 p.m., a juvenile was shot in the lower extremities. Non-life-threatening injuries are about all we know, though, because police have gone quiet since their release that night. A city spokesman had nothing new to share on Saturday or Sunday. No one had been arrested as of Sunday night, and the school district hadn’t answered the local station’s questions.
Over in Indianapolis, a boy and a girl were shot after Warren Central beat Lawrence North 53-37, and the boy is in serious condition while the girl is stable. Police said they didn’t know whether either of them was a student, and investigators had no idea yet what led to the shooting or who pulled the trigger. School police called the Indianapolis cops around 10:35 p.m., and the district, which is on break next week, had not yet responded to reporters when the story was published.
The worst of Friday’s four came in Hardeeville, South Carolina, where 18-year-old Travis Brown was shot and killed in the area of Hardeeville High and Elementary Schools while Hardeeville played Ridgeland in front of an estimated 300 to 400 people. A lockdown kept the school shut down until just after midnight. Hardeeville police insist the shooting wasn’t connected to any school event, activity, or operation. I doubt the distinction means much to the people who spent hours locked down while a homicide played out nearby.
Around 6:15 p.m., at a homecoming game for the Charm City Buccaneers youth football league in Baltimore, an argument over a parking spot allegedly turned into two men pulling guns on each other, according to Police Commissioner Richard Worley, who said one of them fired multiple rounds and hit a little girl he believes was most likely down near the field watching football. That 12-year-old girl died at the hospital, and four other people were wounded, including a 25-year-old woman, two men aged 28 and 23, and a 35-year-old woman who was grazed in the back. Police are looking for at least two male suspects, and nobody has been arrested. A coach with the league said that in 29 years nothing like this had ever happened to them, and Mayor Brandon Scott pointed out that two men couldn’t handle an argument, and now a child is gone.
Again, for the record, those six are the only football shootings from the last few days that I know of. For all I know, there are more that never crossed my screen. A veteran radio announcer who has called high school games for 35 years said he’d never seen anything like Eden Prairie, then shrugged it off as a sign of the times, which might be the most honest thing anybody said all weekend.
So, statements get issued, thoughts and prayers get offered, a dance gets canceled, a district announces who’s old enough to sit in the bleachers, and the next game kicks off on schedule. Nothing will be done about this, because we have collectively decided that this is simply what it costs to gather in America, and the ones paying the bill are teenagers and a 12-year-old who went to her league’s homecoming.
Leave a Reply