Officials, investigators, and stunned residents of a Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood that has experienced far more than its share of violence were left to spend one of Philadelphia’s signature celebratory weekends making sense of one of the deadliest mass shootings in the city’s history.
After five people, including a 15-year-old boy, were killed Monday night, and a 2-year-old and 13-year-old were seriously wounded in a shooting spree that covered several blocks in Kingsessing, a “frustrated and outraged” Mayor Jim Kenney said the nation needs to find out “how to get guns out of dangerous people’s hands.”
Rather than savoring the Independence Day holiday, shocked neighbors feared what might happen next.
Neighborhood resident Amer Barber, 40, said, “I don’t think Philly ever seen something to this degree.”
Not in recent years: It was the highest death toll in a single shooting since the so-called Lex Street Massacre in 2000, in which seven people, including a 15-year-old, were shot and killed in a West Philadelphia drug house.
The motive in Monday’s shootings remained unclear. It was unknown what connection, if any, the alleged killer — identified by sources as Kimbrady Carriker, 40, of Philadelphia — had with the victims.
They were identified as Da’Juan Brown, 15, whose residence was unknown; Lashyd Merritt, 20, of the 5500 block of Greenway Avenue; Ralph Moralis, 59, of the 1700 block of South 56th Street; Dymir Stanton, 29, of the 1700 block of South Frazier Street; and Joseph Wamah Jr., 31, of the 1600 block of South 56th Street. The names of the wounded were not released.
The assailant evidently acted alone, said Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, and the shootings had a disturbingly random quality, according to Ernest Ransom, the head of the Police Department’s homicide unit.
Wearing body armor, a ski mask, and wielding an AR-15-style assault rifle, the shooter was seen on 56th Street between Chester and Springfield Avenues firing “aimlessly” at occupied vehicles and pedestrians, said Ransom.
The shooter fired at a car being driven by a mother who was taking her twins home and injured one of the children, who suffered a gunshot wound to the legs, said Ransom. The other twin suffered injuries to the eyes from glass, he said.
After a foot chase, officers cornered the shooter in the rear alleyway on the 1600 block of South Frazier Street and arrested the suspect without incident, said Ransom.
The suspect was found with a handgun, multiple magazines of ammunition, and a police scanner.
On Tuesday night, Carriker was awaiting arraignment.
Not much was known about Carriker, but Tina Rosette, 49, whose daughter, Cianni Rosette, 24, had lived with the alleged assailant for about year, said Carriker was “really smart, intelligent, creative,” and loved working on computer programs. She added that she never had seen Carriker with a gun.
However, Cianni Rosette said Carriker did show her a handgun several times and “was trying to get me comfortable around guns and stuff like that.”
The oldest of the victims, Ralph Moralis, had been looking forward to walking his eldest daughter down the aisle this weekend, said Tamika Veney, who had been his partner for 25 years and with whom he had remained cordial.
“He was a regular dude, a good person,” she said. She said that devastated family members had been up all night.
Moralis and the other victims were among more than 900 people who have been shot in Philadelphia this year, a 20% decrease compared with the same time last year, police data show. By the end of June, 210 people had been killed in homicides, an 18% drop.
But the last three years have been among the more violent ones on record in the city, and the rate of shootings remains double what it was eight years ago.
The Kingsessing neighborhood is all too familiar with Philadelphia’s gun crisis.
The mass shooting on the steamy eve of Independence Day occurred in one of the city’s most violence-prone neighborhoods. According to an Inquirer analysis of police data, 226 people have been shot in Kingsessing since January 2020, with 65 fatalities, five of them children. Its rate of gun violence per square mile is more than triple the citywide average.
Only six neighborhoods have higher rates.
No neighborhood has experienced a shooting of this magnitude since 2000. In the city’s last mass-shooting incident, three people were killed on South Street in June 2022.
In the so-called Lex Street Massacre in December 2000, seven people were shot and killed and three others wounded, the deadliest ever in the city. Although the execution-style slayings occurred at a crack house, they were the result of a dispute over a car.
A Philadelphia-area man was charged in what may have been the region’s worst mass slaying. In 1949, Howard Unruh was charged with 13 counts of murder for a shooting spree in Camden, but was never deemed competent to stand trial and spent the rest of his life in a mental institution.
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(Staff writers John Duchneskie and Ellie Rushing contributed to this article)
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