8 shot, 1 fatally, in latest Baltimore shooting

A gunman fired indiscriminately into a crowd that had gathered for Sunday afternoon cookouts along a west Baltimore street, killing a man and wounding seven other people, authorities and reports said, according to The Associated Press.

Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said the gunfire erupted on a block in the city's western district of brick row houses. Harrison said a man approached a crowd on foot and began firing in what he called "a very tragic, very cowardly shooting." Speaking at the scene afterward, Harrison said the shooting appeared "extremely targeted," but he didn't provide a possible motive.

The shooting came roughly six weeks after Harrison's swearing-in last month as Baltimore police commissioner, when he promised to make the city safer and lead the department through sweeping reforms required by a federal consent decree. It's a daunting task in one of the country's poorest major cities where there were more than 300 homicides in each of the past two years. Harrison is the city's 14th police leader since the mid-1990s.

The commissioner said there were two cookouts taking place on opposite sides of the street Sunday, and that shell casings were found in two different locations, indicating that there may have been a second gunman, or someone firing back at the first shooter, who fled on foot. It was unclear whether the cookouts were related, Harrison said.

One man who was shot collapsed behind a Baptist church nearby and was pronounced dead at the scene. Harrison said initially that six others had been wounded and were taken to hospitals, but he didn't release their names or their conditions. A police statement later said a man was killed. It said five of the survivors were men ranging in ages from 27 to 58, as well as a 30-year-old woman.

A police spokeswoman later on Sunday evening was cited by The Baltimore Sun as saying an eighth victim, a man with a gunshot wound to the leg, went to a hospital. The report did not elaborate.

"It wasn't anything dealing with the church. I want to make that very clear," acting mayor Jack Young said.

Harrison and Young, in appearance with reporters, urged members of the public to help investigators with any information as to who took part or a motive.

"Someone knows something," Young said. "These things ... they don't happen by happenstance. People know who's doing these shootings."

Baltimore has been plagued by drug-fueled violence for decades and it has long been considered one of the nation's most violent big cities. The corrosive impact of the drug trade and a sea of illegal guns continue to spawn a depressing recurrence of tit-for-tat turf wars and retaliatory attacks in swaths of the city, particularly in the deeply disenfranchised areas of West Baltimore.

Meanwhile, a rabbi who carried on preaching despite being wounded in the latest deadly shooting at a US synagogue said on Sunday that Jews would not be intimidated by the "senseless hate" of anti-Semitism, Agence France-Presse reported.

A 60-year-old woman, Lori Kaye, was killed and three people were wounded when a gunman burst into the synagogue in the southern Californian town of Poway on Saturday and opened fire on the final day of Passover.

Hundreds of people gathered on Sunday night at a park for a vigil to honor the victims, AP reported.

Police identified the shooter as John Earnest, 19, who had posted angry anti-Jewish remarks online just before the shooting and claimed he was behind the arson of another mosque in the area weeks earlier.

According to San Diego County Sheriff's Department records, Earnest faces one charge of murder and three of attempted murder, and will appear before a judge to be formally indicted on Wednesday.

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