ST. LOUIS — Five people were shot and killed here over 22 hours Sunday and Monday, adding to a grim tally this month and boosting a homicide count that has already surged past last year’s, at this time.
The killings happened in five different neighborhoods — four on the north side and one on the south side — and left the city with 13 in seven days and 28 in August, double the total for the month last year.
St. Louis Public Safety Director Dan Isom said the rash of shootings was alarming, especially because investigators do not believe the incidents are connected to each other.
“Any homicide, any loss of life, is distressing,” Isom said. “But when they happen in such a short period of time, it is certainly cause for concern.”
After recording 263 homicides in 2020 — and setting a record high rate — St. Louis saw that number slide by a quarter in 2021. Mayor Tishaura O. Jones credited “a data-driven strategy of deployment and a focus on deterrence, intervention and prevention,” she told The Washington Post.
But August’s surge has now put the city past last year’s pace. As of Monday morning, it had recorded 129 homicides, eight more than this time last year.
A spokesman for Jones declined an interview request for this story.
Killings are generally dropping across the country. The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan criminal justice think tank, released a study late last month that found homicides in 39 major American cities collectively dropped by 2% during the first half of 2022 compared with the previous year. St. Louis was not included in the study.
But the cities’ collective homicide rate was still 39% higher than it was during the first half of 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021 rate in St. Louis, too, while significantly lower than the previous year, was still the highest since 1993.
University of Missouri-St. Louis professor Richard Rosenfeld, one of the study’s authors, on Monday called homicide spikes self-fulfilling, where one shooting leads to a retaliation and so on.
“You get that kind of tit-for-tat process at work and that can escalate a spike very quickly,” he said. “That’s a dynamic that’s always in play when we see homicide rates abruptly increase.”
Isom said that a spate of recent car thefts — what he called a “serious explosion” in stolen Kias and Hyundais, driven by social media — offers increased mobility to those looking to commit crimes. Rosenfeld, too, said his research on dozens of cities demonstrated that an increase in vehicle theft is often matched by an uptick in violent crime.
The 24 hours of violence in St. Louis started Sunday evening:
Just before 6:30 p.m. in the 5900 block of Theodore Avenue, in the Walnut Park West neighborhood, Kristopher Steven Blanton, 27, of O’Fallon, Mo., was found dead in the street.
The second happened just after 9 p.m. in the 200 block of East Grand Avenue in the Near North Riverfront neighborhood. David Wells, 28, of St. Louis, was found dead in the middle of the street.
About 30 minutes later, 23-year-old Deionta McCurry, of unincorporated St. Louis County, near Bel-Ridge, was found dead in an alley in the 3600 block of Montana Street in the Dutchtown neighborhood.
Just after 11 p.m., an unidentified man in his 20s was found dead on a porch in the 4800 block of Farlin Avenue in the Penrose neighborhood.
Then on Monday afternoon, around 3:45 p.m., Jahshua Foster, 25, of St. Louis, was shot and killed in the 3600 block of Lee Avenue in the Fairground neighborhood.
Isom said his department is focused on closing these cases as quickly as possible to hold people accountable.
And he said the Jones’ administration continues to implement and improve violence prevention programs that work to reduce poverty, give young people more things to do and focus police attention on the worst offenders.
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