Suspects wanted after 11 people with gunshot wounds drove through Florida

LACKLAND, Fla. (AP) — A four-door sedan pulled up near an intersection in a central Florida city as people milled about, tinted windows rolled down, and people inside the vehicle began shooting in all directions, injuring 11 people. including two critically, police officials said.

Just a minute ago, a school bus dropped kids off in the Lakeland area on Monday afternoon.

“It sounded like one of those huge coils of firecrackers tied together,” said area resident Tina Smith, who lives 50 feet (15 meters) from where the shooting took place. But you knew they weren’t fireworks.

Authorities offered a $5,000 reward Tuesday for information leading to the arrest of suspects involved in the Lakeland shooting, a city of 112,000 located about halfway between Tampa and Orlando.

One of the seriously wounded was wounded in the stomach, and the other in the jaw. The rest of the injuries are incompatible with life. Authorities said on Monday evening that there were 10 victims of the shooting, but updated that figure to 11 on Tuesday, adding that one of those injured was later taken to hospital with minor injuries.

The victims were men between the ages of 20 and 35, Lakeland Police Chief Sammy Taylor said at a press conference.

After the shooting, the car pulled away. Detectives believed they had found it Tuesday morning in the Lakeland area and planned to run lab tests to confirm it was the vehicle involved in the shooting.

“I have worked here for 34 years and I can tell you that I have never worked at an event where so many people were shot at the same time,” Taylor said. “We consider ourselves a small town… and when things like this happen, it hits me, at least me.”

Taylor said investigators believe the shooting was targeted and not accidental. Some of the shooting victims were cooperative, while others were not, detectives said.

Police said marijuana packaged for sale was found at the scene of the shooting, and investigators believe a drug sale took place. Although the precinct was notorious for drug dealing and other street crimes, according to the scale of the shooting, nothing happened, according to Smith.

“It’s definitely unexpected,” Smith said. “But I still feel safe. Not that the whole block was sprayed. Obviously they came with names on bullets.”

Taylor described the neighborhood of the cinder-block and timber-framed bungalows with small yards as a “problem area” with many tenants, and he said the area has received a lot of police attention in recent years. Many houses have bars on the windows, and on Tuesday, numerous bullet holes could be seen in the window of a nearby apartment building next to the vacant lot where the shooting took place.

Miguel Joseph, a resident of the area, said drug dealing was common in the parking lot and he believed the suspects were from outside the area.

“That’s all they do every day,” Joseph said of selling drugs. I hope they don’t come here again.

The police chief said the officers were trying to remove the “criminal element” from the area and they put “quite a few people from the area” in jail, but often former criminals return to drug dealing when they get out of prison.

“This is a difficult area and there are some challenges,” Taylor said. “We have invested a lot of resources and manpower to fix this.”

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