Two Killed, 35 Injured in Shooting at Georgia Homecoming Block Party

VIENNA, Ga. — Two men were killed and 35 people were injured, some of them critically, when gunfire erupted early on Sunday at a crowded block party in this small south Georgia town, local and state officials said.

Dooly County Sheriff Craig Peavy told a news conference that the two men, aged 21 and 23, were shot dead in Vienna, about 135 miles south of Atlanta, according to Reuters. Thirty-five people were injured, most of them by gunfire, and the wounded ranged in age from 14 to 51, officials said.

The shooting began at around 1:25 a.m. on the 900 block of Pine Street, where deputies were already patrolling a neighborhood block party that had drawn hundreds of people — by local estimates more than 1,000 — at the end of Dooly County High School’s homecoming week, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Deputies found multiple people with gunshot wounds at the scene and two more people several blocks away, in the 600 block of Pine Street, who were pronounced dead there.

Shots from more than one location

Investigators said shots were fired from at least two locations about a block apart, and the sheriff said more than 50 shots rang out as the crowd scattered, according to local reports of the briefing. Several of the injured were hurt not by bullets but by cars, as people tried to flee the area in the dark, the sheriff said.

The victims were taken to several regional hospitals for treatment. The men who were killed had not been publicly identified as of Sunday evening; officials said their families had been notified, and their bodies were to be taken to the state medical examiner’s office for autopsies.

Although the gathering coincided with the local high school’s homecoming festivities, it was not a school-sponsored event, Dooly County School System Superintendent Sherrod Willaford clarified, according to the Associated Press.

No suspect or motive named yet

Authorities said they do not believe there is a remaining threat to the public, but they have not publicly named any suspects or persons of interest, and they have not identified a motive for the shooting, according to Reuters.

“We don’t want to presume as to what caused it,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at the news conference.

The state bureau is assisting the Dooly County Sheriff’s Office with the investigation. Officials asked anyone with information to contact the bureau’s regional investigative office in Perry or to submit an anonymous tip, and said the completed case file would be turned over to the Cordele Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office for review.

Vienna, the Dooly County seat, is a town of roughly 4,000 people along Interstate 75. The shooting capped a homecoming weekend that had drawn families and alumni back to the area, and it left officials on Sunday trying to piece together how a street celebration attended by teenagers as young as 14 turned into one of the largest mass-casualty shootings in the state this year.

Reporting based on coverage by Reuters, People and FOX 5 Atlanta.