Three teenagers have been arrested and charged with murder in Alabama after a shooting at a birthday party on Saturday night killed four and wounded 32, local authorities said on Wednesday.
Ty Reik McCullough, 17, and Travis McCullough, 16, have been arrested and charged with murder, Alabama Police spokesman Sergeant Jeremy Burkett said on a conference call. The two teenagers, from the town of Tuskegee, about 40 miles east of the state capital, were taken into custody Tuesday night, he said. No information about your mobile phone has been transmitted yet.
They will be tried as adults, Attorney General Mike Segrest added, adding that four hospitalized victims were still in serious condition.
Later that day, Alabama authorities tweeted a third arrest. Wilson LaMar Hill Jr., 20, has been charged with four counts of murder.
Victims aged 17 to 23
The birthday party celebrating a teenage girl’s 16th birthday in the small town of Dadeville appeared to have gone haywire when the birthday girl’s mother told guests she’d learned people were armed and told them to leave. according to media reports.
Among the dead is Philstavious Dowdell, the older brother of the girl who was celebrating her birthday. The 18-year-old was an accomplished athlete who received a scholarship to play American football at Jacksonville State University.
Despite the young ages of the victims and the tragic circumstances, this shooting did not make headlines in the United States and elicited relatively little political response, although President Joe Biden was moved that America was “betrayed yet again” by the shooting.
The repetition of such tragedies – a few days earlier a man had killed five people in a bank in Kentucky – reinforces a certain fatalism in public opinion. The country that has more individual weapons than people pays a high price for their proliferation. The very high death rate from firearms cannot be compared with that of other industrialized countries.