12 Shot at Ohio Festival Shooting; Manhunt for Suspects Underway

Hello, everyone. Thanks for being here. I'm officer. I'm Sergeant Muhammad Ali Nasser. I'm the public information officer for the Toledo Police Department. I'm gonna go ahead and introduce our deputy chief Joseph Heffernan to give you guys a quick update. Thanks, Mo. Thanks, everybody for coming out today. We had some unfortunate incident happened here in Toledo. Uh, at about 5 37 p.m. We got a report of some shots fired near Old West End Festival, which is a festival we have every year. Officers were quick to respond right there when the shots were coming out. Here's as though there was at least two shooters. They were probably shooting at each other. Ended up happening was 12. People were struck bullets. That's what we have right now. Two of them critical processing the scene. You have some evidence, and we're following up on some leads. It's pretty active right now. As far as the investigative part of this goes, the scene itself is secured. In fact, I think we're just about breaking down the scene right now. As far as the initial process, does anybody have any questions? Uh, no suspects in custody right now. We're still very early in the investigative process. I might turn this over to our investigative lieutenant. Lieutenant Dan Durkin. He could probably answer some of those more specific questions as far as the investigation. Yeah, it is. The deputy chief said it's real early in the investigation, right? So it's been three hours. We're talking to multiple people, including victims, witnesses, reviewing camera footage. We're doing a whole lot of stuff, but I can't sit here and tell you everything that we have or what we're gonna have, because I don't know what we're gonna have. All right, so we're way early in this for the questions about what we who we want caught. All right. I'm gonna tell you, I'm feeling good about where we're at right now. Um, but we're gonna need the community's help when the time comes. A bunch of people were out there that could probably help us with our investigation. We'll take all the information there is. All right. But as far as who we're looking for, what we've collected and all that so far, that's for another time. All right. The main thing is here is if you have information, you send it to the police department so we can follow up. No, not not as of yet. No. Uh, at this moment, I don't believe so. At least that information hasn't been, uh, relayed to me. Uh, I think I would know that at this point, but right now I don't believe so. You know, I've been around the police department. We all have for a long time within the city. Uh, as far as violence, this is this is over the top, right? So 12 people being shot. It's the most I've been to a scene. I've been to a lot of scenes, but this is this is way over the top. Um, I'm gonna tell you, the oldest person I talked to was 61. The youngest one I talked to was 14. As far as who were shot. Uh, I'm going to tell you that that was pretty young. I want to tell you most everybody, the multiple people that I talked to, I would say, if you want an average, I'd say early twenties. Yeah. I, again, we are at the mercy of the evidence and the video that we're collecting. So we're going to try to be able to figure that out and we'll be able to tell you once we review all that we collected a couple hours ago. We got people going through it. I can't really tell you exactly where everybody is. There'll be a time for that. Correct. What do you mean? I feel a good where we're at. As far as what we've collected so far and my detectives and sergeants and, and the other people that, uh, police department are doing their jobs. So, so yeah. Well, I bet you if I get, we get help from the community, it'll be hopefully sooner than later. But again, it's been three hours video information. Uh, talk to your kids. There's kids out there that probably know more than all of us standing here. Right. So if they can help us, uh, help us out, that'd be great. We passed by we had extra officers, uh, on duty today for the festival. Plus there was a large contingency of off duty officers that were working for the festival itself. Uh, we had our, uh, mobile right into our real time crime center, uh, active. So there is a lot of evidence. Uh, it's just a matter of going through a lot of that evidence. Um, and we, it happened very quickly. Um, but it also stopped well, you know, it's just a shame, you know, when a few people, uh, whatever reasons are going through their head, decide to, uh, disrupt something that has been a beloved community event for many, many, many years, had the security in place just so that we, something like this wouldn't happen. And unfortunately that's the plans that happened anyway. But those are things that we have to kind of do when we're going to dissect what happened and, uh, uh, who was responsible and, and certainly the motives are going to be one of them. You know, why would somebody do something like this? I would say that everybody has to treat people like they would like to be. If we have some people out there, groups of young people that are thinking that this is exciting, uh, it's not, uh, this is a perfect example of how when bullets start flying, it doesn't, they can go anywhere. They can strike anybody. So I know that we're going to be out there. This, we've already made some plans to do some community outreach, especially, uh, with the juveniles in this, uh, city to do some more community policing and, uh, outreach to them about, uh, violence and consequences of violence. Uh, at this, at this time, we'll introduce safety director, George Kral, the city of Toledo. Thank you, Sergeant. Um, I am George Kral. I'm the director of public safety for the city and former police chief here. Um, I'm representing mayor Kepsi Cavish, who is out of town right now. I'm going to echo what Lieutenant Gherkin and, and deputy chief Huffington was saying regarding the need for public input. There were several hundred people there tonight and everybody has one of these. I know in my heart that footage is out there. So I am imploring, uh, my fellow Toledoans to look through your cell phone video and reach out to TPD and help them catch the people who did this. This is one of the most iconic festivals in Toledo. And it's a shame that something like this had to ruin it. So please, uh, I know there's information out there. Please help us help you. We have mechanisms in place to make sure that those people are safe. We have Crime Stopper that is completely anonymous. I challenge anyone who resides in this city that does not have a friend who is a Toledo police officer and can reach out and have those one-on-one conversations. If someone is worried about their personal safety, we can take care of that. That is not a dumb question at all. Uh, we are in discussions with them right now. Um, we are going to talk with the, the festival, uh, leadership with our, with Toledo police's leadership. And I'm assuming that decision will be made later on tonight. All right. We have, um, fire chief, Alison Armstrong with us here today or tonight. Um, did anybody have any questions maybe for her related to, um, this incident? Well, so everything is still being collected. I was on the scene. It was a large scene over a dozen victims, uh, as the police stated. So I don't have that specific information, but I can tell you fire and EMS crews responded immediately. They went into the scene once it was secured by Toledo police began treating, triaging, and then working on plans to transport those patients. As you can imagine, it was a large festival area. Roads are closed and then people are leaving the scene, which makes it difficult for us to get our rigs in and out. So the, I want to also want to mention that Toledo police department helped us treat those patients. They applied tourniquets to some of them. And to my best knowledge, four to five were considered critical and all the patients were off the scene within an hour, which is pretty impressive given the scope of things and the challenges that the crews face is very challenging because, because the festival was already in place. We had a lot of road closures to begin with, and then there's cars parked everywhere. There's people on golf carts, there's people walking. And so just the ingress and egress out of that area was very, very difficult. And then you had police coming in on top of that, closing more roads. So really that was our biggest challenge, at least 13, but we're still collecting information. We're still getting numbers because we treated people on scene, but also sometimes people leave, they hop in cars or they get a ride to the hospital. So I don't have those numbers. TPD would have the exact numbers. I'm very, very proud of the fire and rescue department. Like I said, to get 12, 13, 14 patients off the scene in conditions like that in an hour is impressive. They did an amazing job and kudos to Toledo police for securing and helping them get that done. At this time, I'm going to introduce councilman John Hobbs with the city. Thank you all for being tonight. First of all, I'm extremely thankful for the response of our first responders of our fire department, of our police department, of our detectives to move in an environment like they did today with the crowd and everything else was an amazing effort on everyone's part. I also want to say that what happened today is not a reflection of what our city is and what we stand for. So we are hoping that as a community, we will come together and get this solved quickly. There has to be a tone set early on with summer just started that this type of behavior will not be tolerated and if anyone is thinking about doing something like this, the community is going to respond quickly to put an end to this type of behavior. So we need everyone that thought they saw something that had a phone out that may have been recording something else and looking to check back and please help the victims of this situation. If it were your mom or dad, brother, sister, son or daughter, you would want an immediate response and you will want there to be immediate penalties for what has taken place. So put yourself in the place of those families that are in those hospital rooms right now in the waiting areas. Put yourself in place of parents and S and S and seniors or your neighbors or children that might be watching a parent suffer and ask what you would do to get resolved to this situation. This is the effort and the energy that is needed today right now. Help our detectives get this taken care of because we have to set a tone that this will not be tolerated anymore in our city at any event that is yet to come. There's so much planned this summer for our youth, for our concert series for different things that we have taken place. The 4th of July, all of these, our parades, we need to come out as a community and protect our own and make sure others understand we will come together and this will not be acceptable behavior for the rest of this summer nor anytime. Thank you. Just want to close it out. Um, with all you, uh, thanks for being patient with us. Uh, we were just gathering info and we appreciate your time and you being out here. Um, so thank you.