BALTIMORE — Of all the scenes Thursday night across the city, the one at Pennsylvania and Bloom in West Baltimore was the busiest.
It was a quintuple shooting, five people shot; one person was killed.
“Unsure right now exactly how many shots were fired," Detective Jeremy Silbert said on the scene Thursday evening. "What we do know is that at least one suspect came into the block – this is the 500 block of Bloom street – and started shooting, and that's when our victims were struck,”
Today, police briefly walked the beat in this block, but overall the department said it would have no updates on the shootings, or any of the other scenes from overnight.
There was a murder on North Longwood, near Rosemont, on the city’s west side. A 27-year-old, Justin Forney, was killed just south of the Pimlico race track on Charlgrove in Central Park Heights, and an hour and a half after the quintuple shooting, another man was murdered on Traemore Road in Northeast Baltimore's Harford-Echodale neighborhood.
The 38-year-old Jason Hodge was gunned down on Crimser Avenue in Woodmere.
Then after a brief respite midday Friday, a man was shot and killed in Central Park Heights at 2:50 p.m. Add to that four additional nonfatal shootings and the totals for 2019 are looking worse.
The city of Baltimore is up in murders over last year by four but nonfatal shootings are surging by 56 percent – 81 people have been shot in Baltimore so far this year and survived.
Law enforcement experts will tell you that statistic is ominously revealing and a predictor for more violence. Often when some is shot at and lives, it sparks a chain of retaliation that perpetuates the violence.
WMAR 2-News asked the Baltimore Police Department about leads in any of these cases or how it is trying to stem current or future violence.
The department declined our request for an interview.
