What we know about the Fairmount Park shooting that killed 2 and wounded 9

Police continue to investigate the shooting at Lemon Hill in Fairmount Park that left two people dead and nine others wounded late on Memorial Day.

“This is a heinous act of violence that was inhumane, [with] no regard for life,” Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said at a Tuesday news conference. “There are no words that you can employ to explain this. This is not normal, and we won’t normalize the behavior here in our city.”

Among those injured were several teenagers, officials said. The shooting came in the final hours of Memorial Day, when large crowds were gathered at Lemon Hill amid the holiday.

No suspects had been identified as of midday Tuesday. Investigators believe there were at least three shooters, officials said.

The shooting erupted at around 10:30 p.m. Monday, when “rapid gunfire” was directed at a large crowd on Lemon Hill, Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said. Investigators have not yet announced a motive in the shooting.

In total, 11 people were hit by gunfire. Two people died from their injuries: a 23-year-old woman named Amya Devlin, and a 21-year-old man named Mikhail Bowers. Both were taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center for treatment, and were pronounced dead within an hour of the shooting.

Nine other people aged 15 to 23 were also shot, and were transported to several local hospitals. Many of those injured were struck in their arms or legs, and all of the surviving victims were in stable condition Tuesday, officials said.

Lemon Hill remained closed Tuesday amid authorities’ investigation into the shooting. By midday, police said that they had recovered 21 spent cartridge casings from three different weapons, but the motive and identities of the shooters remained unclear.

Videos of the incident posted to social media made it clear that the weapons used were modified to fire faster, Bethel said. As a result, investigators believe the firearms used were equipped with a device known as a “switch” to enable to faster firing rate.

“The video that was put on social media last night, where you had that rapid fire, we definitely can determine that to be a type of switch for it to automate the weapon,” Bethel said, describing the rapid gunfire as the “sound of war.”

Bethel added that officers were interviewing survivors, and their main focus was identifying the shooters.

A switch is a small device that enables a semiautomatic handgun like a Glock to be used as a fully automatic weapon. In that configuration, weapons equipped with switches can fire bullets extremely quickly, Bethel said Tuesday.

“When you have an automatic weapon, you can empty a magazine, a 20-clip magazine, in seconds. It is meant to kill, to create carnage, and to hit as many people as possible,” Bethel said. “And in this case, you see, it was able to do that.”

Federal law prohibits owning machine guns made after 1986, and includes conversion devices like switches. The devices are specifically banned in Philadelphia and Delaware County, and about half of U.S. states have enacted bans on the devices.

Parker on Tuesday decried the shooting, saying that it involved “wartime ammunition.”

“We will not be held hostage by anyone who decides that they want to get assault-like, warlike weaponry, guns with switches … This was wartime ammunition that was just opened on Philadelphians and those here in our city,” Parker said.

She also pledged to move forward with “prevention, intervention, and enforcement” policies, and called on officials in Harrisburg and Washington, D.C., to hold criminals accountable.

“We need a collective holistic approach to address this issue,” Parker said.

Bethel said that additional officers would be deployed to Fairmount Park starting this weekend in an attempt to identify issues before they escalate into violence. He added that police were evaluating the security plan in place for this weekend’s Roots Picnic at the Mann Center in Fairmount Park.

“We’re going to The Roots with significant planning,” Bethel said. “We will take a look at our deployment and possibly do some additional enhancements.”

Monday’s shooting at Lemon Hill is tied for the second-largest shooting in Philadelphia since 2015. In the past decade, there have been 69 shootings in Philadelphia in which at least five people were shot.

A majority of the largest shootings in that time period have occurred at large gatherings during the summer months, and involved shooters firing into a crowd.

Prior to Monday, the most recent large shooting was the July shooting in Carroll Park in which three people were killed and six others were injured. And the largest shooting since 2015 happened in 2022, when a mass shooting on South Street resulted in three deaths and 12 injuries.

The deadliest shooting in Philadelphia since 2015 was in July 2023, when a shooter armed with an assault rifle and body armor killed five people and injured three others in Kingsessing.