Virginia representative calls for more gun safety policies after suspect was arrested for killing two people and wounding five
A high school student and his father were killed on Tuesday evening at a mass shooting at the young man’s graduation event in Richmond, Virginia, where five other people were shot, according to reports on Wednesday.
Gunfire rang out outside a downtown theater, where the graduation ceremony had just ended, causing hundreds of attendees to flee in panic, weep and clutch their children, authorities and witnesses said.
A 19-year-old suspect tried to escape on foot but was arrested and will be charged with two counts of second-degree murder, Richmond’s interim police chief, Rick Edwards, said during a nighttime news conference at which he confirmed the two fatalities but without confirming their relationship or identities.
On Wednesday, a number of media outlets named the two killed as Shawn Jackson, 18, and his father Renzo Smith, 36.
Five others were wounded by the gunfire outside the state capital’s city-owned Altria Theater, which is across the street from a large, grassy park and in the middle of the Virginia Commonwealth University campus.
The theater is commonly used for school graduations and on Tuesday afternoon it was the turn of the local Huguenot high school. On Wednesday morning, discarded bright yellow sashes that had been worn by teens over their graduations gowns were still lying on the ground.
At least 12 others were injured or treated for anxiety due to the mayhem, according to police.
“As they heard the gunfire, it was obviously chaos,” Edwards said. “We had hundreds of people in Monroe Park, so people scattered.
