Lemon Hill shooting that left 2 dead and 9 wounded was a 'heinous act of violence,' Parker says; shooters' motives unclear

On a day meant to honor the nation’s war dead, shooters attacked a gathering Monday night in a barrage of bullets that city officials said evoked a “wartime” assault.

“This was wartime ammunition that was just opened on Philadelphians and those here in our city,” Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said of the late-night Memorial Day shooting spree in Fairmount Park that left two dead and nine wounded.

The victims ranged in age from 15 to 28, and the wounded were reported in stable condition Tuesday. It was unclear whether they had been targeted.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said 21 shell casings were recovered from three different weapons, but the motive of the shooters and their identities remain unclear.

“We can't specifically say that they were targeted at this point or not,” Bethel said of the shooting victims during a news conference Tuesday. Officers are in the process of interviewing the nine survivors, all of whom were in stable condition.

Bethel said hundreds of people were in the park at the time of the shooting, and videos shared on social media made it clear the weapons were modified to fire quicker into the crowd.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said there would be more officers deployed in Fairmount Park beginning this weekend in an attempt to identify issues before they escalate into violence.

“The intelligence coming through our portal is not fast enough,” Bethel said at a Tuesday news conference. “We need to evolve, and so we're going to be putting a number of different law enforcement assets into the park to identify activity ahead, with the hope that we can stave off these activities before they occur.”

Bethel also addressed safety concerns ahead of The Roots Picnic concert, scheduled to take place this weekend at the Mann Center in Fairmount Park.

With 11 total shooting victims, the Lemon Hill shooting is tied for the second-largest shooting in Philadelphia since 2015. It follows similar trends to other large-scale shootings in recent Philadelphia history.

There have been 69 shootings in Philadelphia over the last 10 years in which at least five people were shot in a single incident. Many of the largest ones have occurred at large gatherings in the summer months, usually parties or cookouts, where shooters fired into a crowd and struck not only their intended targets but also bystanders. Six of the eight shooting incidents since 2015 with nine or more victims occurred during some sort of outdoor celebration.

Before Monday, the most recent large-scale shooting had occurred at a party in West Philadelphia’s Carroll Park neighborhood in July, where three people were killed and six more were injured. More than a hundred people were at a cookout when an argument escalated into a mass shooting.

A defiant Mayor Cherelle L. Parker called a Memorial Day shooting in Fairmount Park a “heinous act of violence” that involved “war-time ammunition.”

“This is a heinous act of violence that was inhumane, [with] no regard for life,” an angry and emotional Parker said at a news conference Tuesday morning. “We will not be held hostage by anyone who decides that they want to get assault-like, war-like weaponry, guns with switches … This was war-time ammunition that was just opened on Philadelphians and those here in our city.”

“There are no words that you can employ to explain this,” Parker said. “This is not normal, and we won't normalize the behavior here in our city.”

Police identified the two people killed in the shooting in Fairmount Park on the night of Memorial Day.

Amya Devlin, 23, and Mikhail Bowers, 21, both of whom lived in Philadelphia, were shot and killed in the gunfire that tore through a crowd of hundreds of people gathered at the Lemon Hill area of Fairmount Park, sending the gathering into chaos.

Devlin was shot in the upper torso and Bowers was shot in the chest, police said. Both were taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where Devlin was pronounced dead at 10:43 p.m. and Bowers was pronounced dead at 11:07 p.m., police said.

At least three shooters opened fire at a massive gathering in Fairmount Park on the night of Memorial Day, police said, leaving nine people injured — including three juveniles — and two people dead.

Large crowds of people gathered at the Lemon Hill area of Fairmount Park throughout Memorial Day, said Police Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore, and police cleared the crowds throughout the night without incident until just before 10:30 p.m.

At that time, what Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel described as “rapid fire” tore through the crowd of hundreds of people, wounding 11.

While the gun involved in the Fairmount Park shooting has yet to be recovered, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said the weapon likely was modified with a gun switch.

"It's pretty rapid fire, we're pretty confident that there was a switch on this gun," Bethel said during an early-morning news conference Tuesday.

A gun switch, also referred to as a Glock switch or button, is a small device that transforms a semiautomatic firearm like a handgun into a fully automatic weapon capable of shooting several rounds per second.

Two people were killed and nine others wounded in a shooting in Philadelphia late Monday night in the waning hours of Memorial Day. 

“Rapid gunfire” erupted on Lemon Hill in Fairmount Park around 10:30 p.m., according to Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel. Two adults — a man and a woman — were killed. Three teenagers between the ages of 15 and 17 were among those wounded. 

“It’s been a challenging day,” Bethel told reporters Monday night, noting the shooter opened fire despite police officers being present in the park.