One of three suspects has been arrested and booked into jail after a shooting Wednesday in downtown Seattle killed a woman and injured seven other people, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said.
At a Thursday news conference, Durkan expressed condolences to the people injured in the gunfire at a busy intersection, including a 9-year-old boy, and to the loved ones of the woman who died.
“No one in our city or country should step out of a coffee shop or get on a bus with fear of violence,” she said at the Seattle Police Department's West Precinct.
Credit: Erika Schultz
Credit: Erika Schultz
Earlier Thursday, police said they were looking for two suspects: Marquise Latrelle Tolbert and William Ray Tolliver, both 24. The shooting followed a dispute outside a McDonald’s, according to Police Chief Carmen Best.
The dispute involved the three suspects, each of whom was carrying a handgun, Best said. Officers who were already working in the area were on the scene within 15 seconds, Durkan said.
Best said the man arrested had been injured in the shooting and was located by police at Harborview Medical Center. He was booked on suspicion of unlawful possession of a firearm.
"Know that Chief Best and I, and the entire city of Seattle are working to bring the perpetrators to justice," Durkan said.
The mayor said the police department will deploy a mobile precinct near where the shooting occurred in an effort to address violence.
At Thursday's news conference, Durkan also focused on the need to get guns out of the hands of criminals.
"If this had been a fistfight, eight people would not have ended up at the hospital," Durkan said.
The mayor was out of town Wednesday, in Washington, at the annual United States Conference of Mayors. She cut her trip short and returned on a plane Thursday morning, a spokeswoman said.
The shooting during Wednesday's evening commute was the third in downtown Seattle in a little more than 24 hours. It came a day after a man was fatally shot about a block away, at Westlake Center, and a couple of hours after police shot a man during a narcotics operation in Belltown.
Violence has erupted many times before in this area downtown, where shoppers, commuters and tourists converge, bus routes intersect and open-air drug dealing has long been commonplace.
Local authorities have repeatedly sought to tamp down criminal activity along a gritty downtown stretch that some call “The Blade” by boosting patrols, carrying out mass arrests and moving bus stops. But such initiatives, launched every few years by a series of Seattle mayors, haven't yielded permanent changes.
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