3 killed, 8 injured in mass shooting at Mississippi homecoming celebration

Two of the dead were only 19. The third was 25 years old. They were gathered together after watching the Holmes County Consolidated School’s homecoming football game earlier. Eight others were injured by the gunfire and taken to local hospitals or airlifted to the state capital of Jackson, 60 miles south of the devastation, according to AP.

The mayhem apparently began after an argument got out of control and two young men began firing into the crowd of about 300 youths. “The football team had won the homecoming game and people wanted to go and celebrate the win,” Holmes County Sheriff Willie March told the Clarion Ledger, “but others didn’t have that same intention.”

“It was chaos, to tell you the truth. The shooting just started and people started running,” March told the Ledger. The celebration was not organized by the school but by the students themselves. A co-owner of the Indian Creek Trail, the site of the party, said festivities were wrapping up when the shooting started.

“We had 30 minutes to go, and I was about to comment, ‘It won’t be long,’ and that’s when I heard the shots going off,” Joe Johnson told WAPT.

Johnson said his venue had security, and guns had been found in the past, but none were discovered this time. He said the firing sounded “like a machine gun” and investigators are looking into whether the gun used has been fitted with a “switch” that enables a semi-automatic pistol to be used as a rapid fire machine pistol.

“You’ve got so much innocent blood that’s being shed, that’s what hurts me,” Johnson said as he revealed that he’s an “ordained minister” who would

“just like to be able to talk to our young people and tell them, you know, ‘to love one another.’”