ST. LOUIS—Police say an 8-year-old girl has been killed and three others injured in a shooting near a high school in St. Louis, bringing the number of children killed by gunfire in the city to at least a dozen since June.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports the shooting happened about 8 p.m. on Aug. 24 outside Harold’s Chop Suey restaurant in the city’s Academy neighborhood.
Police Chief John Hayden said the girl, identified by police as Jurnee Thompson, and her family had attended a football exhibition about a block away at Soldan High School. Hayden says fights broke out at the event, and police tried to clear the area when shots rang out.
Police say the injured included two 16-year-old boys and 64-year-old woman. Hayden says “two or three” of the people who were shot were related.
Hayden said several people were detained for questioning.
Police identified the 8-year-old victim shot and killed Friday night as Jurnee Thompson. Jurnee and 3 others were wounded in a quadruple shooting near Soldan High School in North St. Louis . Her father tells me she was a loving and caring little girl that will be missed. pic.twitter.com/dKdn58ozID
— Kelley Hoskins FOX2 (@KelleyHoskins) August 24, 2019
St. Louis has seen a rash of children fatally shot this summer. A 7-year-old boy was shot on Aug. 13 while standing near a teenager and two other children on the city’s north side.
The shootings involving children have angered city’s police chief and frustrated city leadership. Police said much of the violence is tied to drug dealing and the children happen to be caught in the way.
Facts About Crime in the United States
Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).
The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.
The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.
The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.
While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend.
Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.
Mortality Figures in the United States
According to 2017 data from the CDC, the 10 leading causes of death in the United States were: heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, kidney disease, and suicide.
These further break down as follows: the most common are unintentional poisoning deaths (58,335), followed by motor vehicle traffic deaths (40,327), and unintentional fall deaths in third place (34,673).
The total number of emergency department visits for unintentional injuries in the United States in 2017 was 29.2 million, according to the CDC.
The 10 leading causes accounted for 74 percent of all deaths in the United States in 2017.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.