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(Trends Wide) — Six people were shot, including two with life-threatening injuries, in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Saturday night, police said.
Officers patrolling the area heard gunshots shortly after 11:45 p.m. on Cherry Street and arrived at a scene of “multiple participants exchanging gunfire and numerous people fleeing the area,” police said.
Multiple shooting victims were taken to a hospital for treatment, Police Sgt. Jeremy Eames said. Four are expected to survive, while two have life-threatening injuries, he said. Most of those who were shot were in their teens or early 20s, he added.
“We had large groups of young people walking around downtown on this date and we believe it is within that group that the shooting took place,” he said. Police said they arrested at least one person in connection with the shooting.
So far this year there have been 221 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive. A mass shooting is defined as an incident with at least four people injured by gunshots, excluding any attackers. The shooting also comes days after an 18-year-old man used a legally purchased AR-15 rifle to kill 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, again raising the question of whether this type of weapons should be legally available.
The site of Saturday night’s shooting is less than a mile from the Tennessee Aquarium and the city’s waterfront.
Patrick Hickey, who was driving for Uber and Lyft on Saturday night, told Trends Wide he was parked in his usual spot waiting for another ride when he heard at least two dozen shots. Hickey works as a volunteer firefighter, so he went into action.
“I helped two victims, one of them with a head injury,” Hickey said. “I couldn’t run in another direction or walk away knowing there were a lot of people hurt.”
One of the victims ended up on the sidewalk near his car, so he took a shirt from his vehicle and applied pressure to the wound, he said.
“(People) were screaming for help, the relatives of the victims were also there,” he said. “The police were trying to get everyone to come back so they could help the victims. It was chaos for a minute.”
Hickey added that this Sunday morning he realized that his shoes had blood from one of the victims.
“I am blessed to be able to return home to my family unharmed, but it was a very scary situation,” Hickey said in a Facebook post. “Please give your family an extra hug because this is becoming commonplace in America.”
Trends Wide’s Eric Levenson and Tina Burnside contributed to this report.
