Coroner identifies 6 people killed in Sacramento mass shooting

SACRAMENTO, Calif (NewsNation) — Police in Sacramento are looking for multiple suspects in connection with a downtown shooting that left six people dead and at least 12 others injured.

“People can’t go to a club and have fun without worrying about not coming out and not being alive the next day,” said Pamela Harris.

Police confirmed that three men and three women were killed in the shooting. One of the victims was Harris’ son, 38-year-old Sergio Harris. She says Sergio’s cousin, Devazia Turner, 29, was also killed in the gunfire.

“My son has a wife, he has children. All of that. And all of that is gone because someone wanted to pull out a gun and spray everyone coming out the club. That’s not right,” she said.

The Sacramento County coroner identified Monday the three women who were killed as Johntaya Alexander, 21; Melinda Davis, 57; and Yamile Martinez-Andrade, 21. The last male victims was identified as Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32.

Gunfire erupted around 2 a.m. Sunday as bars closed for the night and crowds emptied onto downtown streets. The cause of the shooting is still under investigation. Police are searching for at least two suspects and have recovered one firearm.

This is “a very complex and complicated scene,” Sacramento Police Chief Kathy Lester said.

Alexandra Arellano, who works at a nearby lounge, said she was almost caught up in the gunfire

“Me and my friend, we’re gonna walk out the door because that’s where we wait outside for the security guards. And my friend just stopped. She’s like, ‘No, don’t go out there.’ And we’re like, ‘why not?'” Arellano said on “Morning in America.” “And as soon as we’re gonna walk out, everyone started running in the shooting started. And it was just unreal, to be honest. I never in a million years would have ever imagined experiencing something like that.”

Lester issued a plea to the public, asking for witnesses or anyone with recordings of the incident to contact police.

“The scale of violence that just happened in our city is unprecedented during my 27 years here with the Sacramento Police Department,” Lester said.

Sunday’s violence was the second mass shooting in five weeks for California’s capital city and one of 119 mass shootings so far in 2022, according to data from The Gun Violence Archive.

President Joe Biden called for action on gun crimes in a statement Sunday.

“Today, America once again mourns for another community devastated by gun violence,” Biden said. “But we must do more than mourn; we must act.”

Sacramento has endured two mass shootings in the last five weeks. On Feb. 28, a father killed his three daughters, a chaperone and himself in a Sacramento church during a weekly supervised visitation. David Mora, 39, was armed with a homemade semiautomatic rifle-style weapon, even though he was under a restraining order that prohibited him from possessing a firearm.

The former Sacramento police chief, Daniel Hahn, said Monday that in order to resolve the issue of gun violence, long-term problems must be solved.

“What we really have to do, if we want long-term change in these sorts of things, is deal with the long-term challenges of poverty and other things that drive the lack of hope and drive people to solve their problems by indiscriminately shooting like this,” Hahn said on “Morning in America.”

Hahn isn’t alone in that opinion.

“It’s been a problem and we’ve been saying this — to the mayor, to elected officials — that it’s been a problem,” said Leia Schenk, who is the founder of EMPACT, a community support organization and social justice advocate.

“We need help. We need in order to help our community,” she said.

The area where Sunday’s killings occurred is on the outskirts of the city’s main entertainment district and has many bars and restaurants. It’s anchored by the Golden One Center that attracts big-name concerts and is home to the NBA’s Sacramento Kings.

Sacramento police told NewsNation that their downtown cameras captured the moment the shooting occurred, which will be helpful in identifying the suspects.

“Fortunately, there’s a lot of cameras in our downtown area now. And obviously, everybody has a cell phone,” Hahn said. “So we’ve already seen a lot of cellphone videos crop up on social media. So they’ll definitely be reviewing them. And also talking to witnesses gathering evidence, you see all the evidence markers all over the ground, that’s either rounds, bullet casings, or other pieces of evidence. So there’s a lot of work that will be going in into trying to find the people that did this.”