TOLEDO, Ohio — Editor's note: The attached video is from a story related to the Whitmer High School shooting that aired on Oct. 10, 2022.
During a press conference for the city of Toledo's Rooftops Repair Program on Tuesday, Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz offered comments regarding Friday night's shooting at Whitmer High School.
Kapszukiewicz said the surveillance video at Whitmer indicated the shooting, which injured three people, was not a random drive-by shooting.
"It's clear that one of the individuals was being targeted," he said. "The silver vehicle was on Whitmer Drive and was waiting there for quite a while. So when the person they were waiting for came out, that's when two individuals go out of the car and did what they did."
Kapszukiewicz then broadened the scope of his comments from the logistics of Friday's violence to the landscape of violence in Toledo.
"There's a lot of blame to go around," he said. "I think there's a breakdown of policing and a breakdown of the government. At the family level. Social level. Just about everyone can look in the mirror when an event like this happens."
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The presence of guns and widespread gun ownership were also cited by Kapszukiewicz as reasons behind incidents like the Whitmer shooting.
"At least one of the reasons is because we're the only country on earth where there are more guns than human beings," he said. "We're the only one."
Figures from a 2018 study by the Small Arms Survey, which is headed by Political Science lecturer Aaron Karp at Old Dominion University, corroborate this claim. According to the survey, 393,347,000 firearms were in civilian possession in the United States in 2017. At the time, the U.S. population clocked in at 326,474,000, nearly 67 million fewer than the number of firearms.
Behind the U.S. in terms of gun ownership is India and China, the two most populous countries in the world, whose civilian firearm possession come in at 71 million and 49 million, respectively.
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Kapszukiewicz said the presence of guns has changed the landscape of physical violence.
"The sorts of disagreements that used to end with a bloody lip or nose on the playground, now end in shootings," he commented. "And that's the America we live in now."
Toledo police identified three victims Monday.
According to a police report, the victims are Maurice Winfree, 21, of Toledo, Breanna Burwell, 28, of Kissimmee, Fla., and a 17-year-old Whitmer High School student. WTOL 11 does not name underage victims of non-fatal shootings.
All three are expected to make a full recovery.
The shooting happened around 9:50 p.m. Friday during the fourth quarter of the Whitmer-Central Catholic game at Whitmer. More than 12 gunshots were heard at the southwest corner of the stadium near the main entrance.
Police found several shell casings on the ground behind the field house. As of Tuesday afternoon, no arrests have been made.
On Monday night, police released a photo of the car suspected to have been used in the shooting.
