Eleven people were shot, six of them children, when gunfire broke out on a street beside a university football stadium in Tallahassee, Florida, on Saturday night, just as crowds were leaving a homecoming game.
The shooting happened just before 8 p.m. local time on Perry Street, near Bragg Memorial Stadium, home of Florida A&M University’s football team. A twelfth person, a grandmother, was hurt while fleeing the scene. Police said one victim was in critical condition, three were seriously injured, and eight were stable. No one has died, and no arrests had been made by late Saturday night.
Tallahassee Police Chief Lawrence Revell told reporters at a late-night news conference that the youngest person shot was 11 years old, and that one of the victims was a student at Florida A&M, known as FAMU. “I stand before you tonight devastated,” he said. “No family should have to experience this kind of violence, this kind of fear, this kind of heartbreak.”
According to police, the gunfire followed an argument between a small group of people. “An altercation occurred between individuals,” Revell said. “We do not know exactly what happened. What we do believe is that this was an isolated incident between two or three individuals.” Detectives and forensic teams were still working at the scene late into the night, and officers were searching for suspects.
The university had played its homecoming game at Bragg Memorial Stadium that afternoon, losing to Arkansas-Pine Bluff, and the streets around the stadium were packed with students, alumni and families when the shots rang out. FAMU sent a shelter-in-place alert at 8:40 p.m., urging people near the stadium to avoid Perry Street, and later said the campus itself remained safe. Florida State University, also in Tallahassee, issued its own emergency message at 10 p.m. telling people in the area to stay indoors.
Witnesses described panic as the crowd scattered. Student Jayden Dubois told local television station WCTV: “We heard a couple gunshots and a crowd of people running. I had gotten trampled a little but as I got up, I turned to my right and saw a person laid out on the ground.” Revell praised first responders who, he said, picked up victims and carried them in their arms because they could not get vehicles through the mass of people.
Florida A&M is a historically Black university — a category of American institutions founded in an era when Black students were largely barred from other colleges — and homecoming there is one of the biggest weekends of the year, drawing graduates and their families back to campus for the game, parades and reunions. That is part of what made Saturday night so jarring: a family celebration, in a crowd full of children, turned in seconds into a crime scene.
Police have asked anyone who saw what happened, or who has video or information, to come forward, and they have stressed that they do not believe this was a wider attack on the university. But the questions that matter most are still unanswered: who fired the shots, what the argument was about, and how a dispute between two or three people ended with eleven people wounded, half of them children.
That pattern is what gives this shooting weight beyond one Florida city. In the United States, gun violence has repeatedly intruded on the places where communities gather — schools, churches, festivals and now a homecoming weekend — and children keep appearing in the casualty lists. The Tallahassee victims were not inside a classroom or a stadium; they were on a public street after a game, in exactly the kind of crowd that forms after any big sporting event anywhere in the world. When a celebration becomes a shooting scene, the sense of safety around public gatherings takes the hit, not just the people caught in the gunfire.
For now, the investigation is the story. Police say the scene is secure but the search for suspects continues, and the condition of the critically injured victim will be watched closely. Updates from Tallahassee police are expected as detectives piece together what happened on Perry Street — and as families wait to learn whether the children hurt on Saturday night will recover fully.
Earlier this month, Informopedia reported on a school shooting in Bend, Oregon, in which three children and a teacher were killed, and on a drive-by shooting in Trappes, France, that prosecutors took over as a terrorism case.
