In the midst of heavy crowds celebrating the Saints Super Bowl success on Bourbon Street, New Orleans Police officers say three innocent bystanders were hit by stray bullets after someone fired into the crowd early Monday morning.
“We heard two shots,” said Joseph Pattan, a Baton Rouge resident who traveled to the French Quarter to watch the Super Bowl at a bar adjacent to the shooting. “We kinda hid behind some people and we looked outside … we saw bullet casings on the ground.”
Pattan’s friend, Ashton Brown, says in the wake of the gunfire all he was thinking about was how to get to safety.
“I was just trying to get away,” said Brown.
Two woman, ages 29 and 37, and one 26 year old man were struck by stray bullets and hospitalized. Another woman, who initially thought she had also been shot, was hospitalized as well after falling and splitting her knee in the midst of the gunfire.
“We do have two individuals detained,” said NOPD Asst. Superintendent Marlon Defillo. “Both were armed with pistols…we’re in the process right now of trying to determine if in fact they were involved in this shooting incident.”
Just after midnight, both men were seen running away from the scene of the shooting at the corner of Iberville and Bourbon Streets--an area patrolled by about 200 officers, according to Defillo.
As for the possible relationship between the shooter and the victims, Defillo says he doesn’t think one exists.
“I don’t believe these [people] were intended targets,” said Defillo. “This is just one incident, unfortunately, it’s an incident that occurred with a shooting, but overall with tens of thousands of people on Bourbon, we’d not had any major incidences up until this point.”
On Friday, NOPD officers arrested a 16 year old boy after he allegedly shot a 17 year old on Canal Street just minutes after a Carnival parade passed by that evening.
