At least 17 people were injured in a shooting in downtown Milwaukee on Friday night, just blocks from the arena where an NBA playoff gam...
At least 17 people were injured in a shooting in downtown Milwaukee on Friday night, just blocks from the arena where an NBA playoff game ended hours earlier, the city said. police.
The Milwaukee Police Department said there were no fatalities in the shooting, which happened around 11:09 p.m. in a popular nightlife area. The victims were between 15 and 47 years old and were all expected to survive, police said.
Ten people were in custody in connection with the shooting, and police said they recovered nine firearms from the scene, which was near the arena, the Fiserv Forum. Police said the investigation is continuing and they are still looking for other people who may have been involved in the shootings. What led to the shooting was unknown.
At least 11,000 people had gathered outside the arena on a watch party in an area known as the Deer District to watch the The Milwaukee Bucks take on the Boston Celtics in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals.
The next game in the series is Sunday in Boston. Another watch party which also has the capacity for 11,000 people is planned in the Deer district of Milwaukee.
Just under two hours earlier on Friday, three people were injured in a shooting in another nightlife area adjacent to the Deer District. The victims were two men, aged 26 and 29, and a 16-year-old woman. They were all expected to survive, police said. A 19-year-old man was in custody in connection with the shooting, police said.
Jake O’Kane, 25, knew the first shooting took place just before he left the arena with his girlfriend and two friends, but that didn’t stop his group from continuing to the bars.
“It’s kind of the normal Milwaukee – the kind of little isolated, one-off incident – that happens, unfortunately, quite often,” O’Kane said. “That didn’t discourage us at all.
After a few hours downtown, Mr O’Kane was waiting for an Uber when he heard more gunshots. A video Mr. O’Kane took from where he was standing about a block away from the shooting shows people running through the streets.
Mr. O’Kane, who lives about 90 minutes away in Appleton, Wisconsin, said downtown violence has become a common occurrence in recent years, a notable increase from before the pandemic. He added that worries about downtown have kept some of the games away, like when his mother stayed home during the NBA Finals last year.
Three people were injured in a shooting in the same neighborhood during a Bucks championship celebration last July, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
Mr O’Kane said he would still come to games but would be reluctant to spend time downtown afterwards. “Maybe we’ll come back downtown, but it will be: go to the game, get out of there,” he said.
Bil Reinemann, 72, a parking attendant near the arena, heard what he thought were gunshots in the first downtown shooting. “I really knew it was something beyond firecrackers,” he said. He too was concerned about the effect of the violence on future events in the region.
“It doesn’t do anything positive for the imagery of downtown, especially this neighborhood,” he said.
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