A string of gun violence continued in Seattle on Monday as a seventh person was injured in a shooting in Pioneer Square. Police say four people have been killed in shootings since Sunday.
Homicide detectives are investigating the fatal shooting of a Lake City man on Sunday night. The shooting was reported just after 10 p.m. outside an apartment building in the 12700 block of 33rd Avenue Northeast where a 28-year-old man was found shot in the chest, police said.
Seattle police spokesperson Valerie Carson said witnesses saw the victim returning to his apartment when a vehicle pulled up and multiple people opened fire. Another person was grazed by a bullet, but did not require medical assistance, she said.
Earlier Sunday, shootings over a span of three hours in four Seattle neighborhoods left three dead and five injured. On Monday morning, officers also investigated a shooting that injured a man inside an encampment near the Yesler Terrace neighborhood.
The man, 39, was transported to Harborview Medical Center with non-life-threatening injuries, police said. Details about what led to the shooting were not immediately available.
These shootings continue an ongoing uptick in gun violence that's already killed or wounded more than 200 people in King County so far this year. The unrelated shootings Sunday morning occurred in the Belltown, Pioneer Square, Chinatown International District and Capitol Hill neighborhoods.
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said in a statement that Sunday's shootings were part of a national epidemic that saw more than 900 shootings in cities across the country just last week.
Interim Seattle police Chief Adrian Diaz said the rise violence comes at a time when the Seattle Police Department is seeing a steady decline in the number of rank-and-file police officers able to respond to crime. About 270 officers had left the department over the past 18 months as of June.
"This isn't just a staffing crisis. We have a public safety crisis," Diaz said in a statement.
Seattle police made two arrests in connection with the Belltown shooting. One man was booked into the King County Jail on investigation of homicide, and a second man was booked on investigation of unlawful discharge of a weapon, Carson said. No other arrests had been announced as of Monday morning.
