Crimo drives a silver Honda Fit, with an Illinois license plate: DM 80653. A photo distributed by the authorities shows that Crimo has tattoos on his cheek and above an eyebrow. Crimo is armed, police said. Citizens are urged not to approach him, but to call a special telephone number.
Video footage shows people fleeing when shots are heard. The parade had just started. Police suspect the gunman fired at the parade from a rooftop. Officers found a firearm believed to belong to the assailant. The police call it a “weapon with a lot of power”. They suspect that the perpetrator was working alone.
The police searched for the fugitive perpetrator several hours after the massacre. It would be a white man between the ages of 18 and 20 with black hair. It is unclear what the motive was for the shooting. “This seems completely arbitrary,” said a local sheriff. People were advised to stay indoors. Police snipers were on the rooftops in the area.
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People flee when shots are heard.
Eyewitnesses reported dozens of shots fired during the parade. Then chaos ensued. Shawn Cotreau was there with his wife and three children. “My wife looked up and yelled ‘get up, run.’ I turned and saw the shooter.” According to Cotreau, the shooter was on the roof of a shop. “He just opened fire. I saw the bullets hit a tree in front of us,” he told the New York Times.
Chaos followed as spectators fled en masse. “We picked up our kids and sprinted to the car,” Carrie Mangoubi told the Chicago Tribune. She and her family moved from Chicago to Highland Park because it would be safer in this suburb. “How do you explain this to your children?”
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Eyewitness Zoe Pawelczak first thought of fireworks when she heard the shots, but then ran for her life, she tells CNN. “I saw a little girl who had been shot. Then we hid for an hour in a sports shop. A man who was hiding with us was bleeding from his ear, another girl was hit in the leg.”
The shooting comes on a major national holiday in the US. The birth of the country is celebrated on the Fourth of July. It is traditionally a day of parades, barbecue and fireworks. This massacre also comes relatively shortly after several other shootings that caused many victims. At the end of May, nineteen children and two teachers died at a school in Uvalde, Texas, before that ten at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
54 people shot since Friday
It is one of several shootings that have taken place over the Fourth of July weekend. A total of 54 people have been shot since Friday, 7 of whom did not survive. On Friday alone, 22 people were shot in the United States, 4 of whom have died.
Last year, as many as 19 people were killed and more than 100 were shot during independence weekend.
PODCAST. Despite all the suffering, an important part of the American population and especially politicians do not want to give up the gun culture. You will hear how that works in this Telegraaf Explainer: