HIGHLAND PARK: On Monday, a man armed with a high-powered rifle opened fire from a rooftop during a Fourth of July parade in the affluent Chicago suburb of Highland Park, killing six people and injuring at least two dozen others.
An official reported that a gun was found on the spot. The official injury toll was 24 persons, although a hospital spokesperson said 31 were hurt.
Police released a description of a white male between the ages of 18 and20, asking for the public’s assistance in locating him through tips, cellphone photographs, and security video. They shot without any apparent reason.
“We are aggressively hunting for the individual who’s responsible,” sheriff’s department spokesperson Christopher Covelli told the press. “He could be in the city. He may be somewhere else.”
The inquiry has made “great progress,” he said, without providing details beyond the fact that the shooting occurred on the roof of a building that the gunman had accessed by an unlocked alley ladder.
Many Americans are still reeling from the murder that took place on May 24 at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 students and two instructors were slain, and from the attack that took place on May 14 at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in which 10 people were killed.
President Joe Biden said he and his wife Jill were “struck by the terrible gun violence that has again caused sadness to an American community on this Independence Day.”
Biden said he had “surged federal law enforcement to assist in the urgent search for the shooter.”
Despite the recent bipartisan gun-reform legislation he signed, “I’m not going to give up battling the plague of gun violence,” Biden said in his statement.
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Twenty-six patients were being cared for at NorthShore Highland Park Hospital in Highland Park, and five were transferred to NorthShore Evanston Hospital. Spokesperson Jim Anthony added, “The great majority sustained gunshot wounds.”
