Three people were killed and eight others were wounded in central Mississippi early Saturday when at least two people opened fire on a group of several hundred people celebrating a high school football team’s victory on an outdoor field several hours after the game ended. The authorities said.
Holmes County Sheriff Willie Marsh said the mass shooting near the Lexington community was preceded by a fight between some men at the celebration, but deputies do not yet know what caused the fight.
Al-Sharif said in a phone interview with The Associated Press that between 200 and 300 people were on the road celebrating, and the gunfire caused them to flee.
“It was a mess, to tell you the truth,” Marsh said. “The shooting just started and people started running.”
The shooting came about 5 miles (8 kilometers) outside Lexington after a football game several hours earlier at a Holmes County Unified School District homecoming celebration. After the victory, dozens of young people headed to the trail to celebrate.
Lexington is located more than 60 miles (96 km) north of Jackson.
Two of the victims who died were 19 years old and the third was 25 years old. The injured victims were airlifted to local hospitals.
Marsh, whose county has a population of about 16,000, said deputies are collecting ammunition at the scene in an attempt to determine how many weapons were fired.
There had been about 420 mass shootings across the United States before this weekend, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The nonpartisan archive defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more victims are injured or killed.
Perennially high rates of mass shootings in the United States have led some in the country to call for greater federal gun control, although Congress has largely been unable or unwilling to implement such measures.
Guardian staff contributed reporting