A shooting outside a nightclub in Allentown, Pennsylvania early Thursday morning left 10 people wounded in what authorities say they suspect is an incident connected to “gang violence.”
The shooting occurred outside the Deja Vu nightclub shortly before 2 a.m. Thursday morning, the Associated Press reports. According to police, most of the victims either had just left the club or were standing on the sidewalk when the bullets began to fly.
“There have been no arrests, and the motive for the shooting was unclear,” AP reports. “Witnesses said they saw several panicked people fleeing the scene on foot, and at least one car was spotted speeding away.”
Officials say they believe as many as three shooters may have been involved and that they suspect this is a case of gang violence.
“It appears that at least one individual was a target,” Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin said in a statement reported by The Morning Call. Though there have been no arrests, Martin said “it does not appear that the community at large is at risk from the perpetrators involved here.”
“It is more likely than not that the outcome of the investigation will reveal a connection to gang violence,” he said, noting that some witnesses have been uncooperative.
The Morning Call describes the incident as “one [of] Lehigh Valley’s worst mass shootings in recent memory.” The paper also notes that the owner of Deja Vu, Osiris “Tito” Guzman, was recently “arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, false identification to authorities and public drunkenness for his role in a weekend brawl outside another nightclub, The View.”
The police say they do not believe the brawl and the shooting are connected, however.
One witness told The Morning Call that the gunshots woke her up and she witnessed people running across the parking lot of the shopping center and a car speed away. “When everything went silent all you could hear is the screaming and panicking,” she said. “All I could think was someone is dying.”
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