Police in the midwestern U.S. state of Illinois have captured a man they have labeled a “person of interest” in Monday’s deadly shooting attack on an Independence Day parade.
Twenty-two-year old Robert E. Crimo III (the Third) was taken into custody hours after a brief car chase just outside of Highland Park, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, where six people were killed and more than 30 others wounded when a gunman opened fire on parade goers from the rooftop of a building along the route.
Police said five people died at the scene, while another person died at a nearby hospital. The Mexican Foreign Ministry says one of those killed was a Mexican national.
A doctor at a Highland Park hospital says they received 26 wounded people from the parade between eight and 85 years of age.
Cellphone video captured scores of people running from the scene in panic as the sound of rapid gunfire echoed loudly off nearby buildings. Lawn chairs, baby strollers, portable food containers and other objects were scattered along the parade route, abandoned by people who ran for cover.
U.S. President Joe Biden issued a statement saying he and his wife, first lady Jill Biden, were “shocked by the senseless gun violence that has yet again brought grief to an American community on this Independence Day.”
The Highland Park shooting occurred more than a week after President Biden signed the first major federal gun violence bill passed by Congress in decades. The bipartisan compromise bill was passed after two mass shootings in May, including a racist attack that left 10 people dead at a grocery store in a black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, and a rampage at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 schoolchildren and two teachers dead.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.