LOS ANGELES — Four people were killed and one person was wounded in a shooting at a home in Inglewood early Sunday, in what the mayor called the worst act of violence in the city in years.
Firefighters and paramedics were dispatched at 1:43 a.m. to the 1300 block of Park Avenue, according to a Los Angeles County Fire Department dispatcher. Officials said they didn’t know the motive for the shooting and were looking for suspects.
During a morning news conference, Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts Jr. said multiple weapons were used, including one assault rifle and one handgun. The victims appeared to have been targeted, he added.
“This is the largest number of shooting victims that have been injured in this city since the 1990s,” Butts told reporters. “When I think about this and hear a crime like this anywhere in New York, in Los Angeles, in Santa Monica, in Culver City, these are sociopathic killers that have to be sequestered from society.”
Butts urged the suspects to turn themselves in. “We will find you and prosecute you,” he said.
There were five gunshot victims and three were pronounced dead at the scene, the Los Angeles Fire Department told KNBC-TV Channel 4. Paramedics rushed two others to a hospital.
The street where the shooting happened is lined with one- and two-story homes, not far from Edward Vincent Jr. Park and Centinela Elementary School. It’s less than two miles from the new SoFi Stadium, which will host the NFC championship game next week and also be the site of the Super Bowl on Feb. 13.
Police had blocked off Park Avenue in multiple directions, and at least a dozen plastic cones marking shell casings could be seen in the street. Inglewood Police Department cars were blocking multiple points of entry to the area.
A group of about two dozen potential mourners could be seen up and down Brett Street at one end of the sprawling crime scene.
The killings come amid a two-year rise in homicides in Los Angeles County — and other places across the country — that has been met with alarm.
The city of Los Angeles saw nearly 400 killings in 2021, marking the most homicides of any year since 2007. Young Latino and Black men continue to be overrepresented among the dead, data show.
An analysis by The Times of killings in L.A. County through the first 11 months of 2021 showed sharp increases in neighborhoods such as Watts and adjoining Florence-Firestone, which each had more than 20 killings, and in other cities in the broader L.A. region, including Compton and Long Beach, which each had more than 30.
Inglewood had not seen the same increase in killings in 2021 as some neighboring areas.
According to Los Angeles Times data, from January through November 2021, the city recorded 13 homicides, just one more than during the same period in 2020. More recent data were not immediately available.
Inglewood has been in the midst of a major revitalization in recent years, centered around SoFi Stadium. Home prices lately have soared in some parts of the city of 107,000, driven in part by new restaurants and businesses and the anticipated opening of the $2 billion Crenshaw light-rail line.
