DETROIT (WXYZ) — Thousands of people are in downtown Detroit this holiday weekend for Tigers baseball and the Movement Electronic Music Festival. But the guns and the bullets are not taking a holiday off.
Early Sunday morning, two people were shot. One person died and another was injured at Russell and Alford streets in the Eastern Market area. The injured person is not cooperating with police.
Another shooting happened early Monday morning in a parking lot near Columbia and Clifford streets, across from Bookies Bar.
Jay Lambrecht is the owner of the bar and was not there when it happened around 2 a.m., but customers came in after it happened. They say it started a few blocks away by Grand Circus Park and moved over. Lambrecht says they described “multiple shots fired and then three individuals got into a car and took off.”
Two weeks ago, a few blocks away, a big group gathered near the corner of Brush and Congress streets and got into a shootout late at night. Police were nearby and got involved in the shootout. Three people were injured.
“I'm not coming down at 2 o'clock in the morning. I'm going to stay out of that. You know, when it’s not daylight, I’m not coming down,” said Samantha Calabrese, who came to the Tigers game from Flat Rock, downriver from Detroit.
A family of five drove in from Grand Rapids for the game. They’ve heard about the shootings. For them, it’s either Detroit or Chicago.
“We were talking about that on the ride down. You know, we come down here before Chicago anytime. The kids even brought that up, you know, he's always going to Chicago and we're not going to Chicago,” Rob Laughlin, the dad of the group, told 7 Action News.
The Ilitch family that owns the Tigers, Detroit Red Wings and Little Caesars Arena has their own safety patrols downtown assisting Detroit police. And this summer, the Wayne County sheriff has added patrols and presence.
Last summer, there was trouble in Greektown, and a big fight was caught on camera. So yes, we’ve been here before. And it’s bad for business.
“Obviously, we're having these issues that continue and continue to dissuade people like us, like, you know, our friends. You know, we don't come down here to hang out at night. We're down here for a ballgame. We get in we get out and that's it,” Calabrese's husband Craig Calabrese said.
Lambrecht says it’s bad for business.
“Business owners coming out of COVID, we’re trying to get people to come back down and patronize the city. So, it makes it tough? It does. So hopefully they find out who these culprits were that did this heinous crime and we can move on from it.”
That shooting victim is a John Doe adult male with no identify on his body. He was dead on the scene.
