19 people were shot in New Orleans during a Mother's Day parade Sunday, including a 10-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl.
Three victims are in critical condition. The 16 others, including the two children, were only grazed by stray bullets that the FBI say were a part of "street violence," not terrorism.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu told the press that the incident was an enormous tragedy for New Orleans on Mother's Day.
"We have mothers that were shot, sisters that were shot, little children that were shot," he said, according to a Los Angeles Times article.
Sunday at about 1:50 p.m. local time, parade participants and bystanders were in what locals callthe "second line"- the name for impromptu parades that snake through the avenues of New Orleans on a regular basis.
On Sunday, marching bands and dancers entertained onlookers with music and drinking in east New Orleans' Seventh Ward, when a round of gunshots went off.
In a video posted on social media sites, a man in a white t-shirt shoots into a crowd of about 200 people.
Shots can also be heard firing off from at least two firearms in the video, which police have confirmed in a statement released after the shooting.
"When the end of the parade reached North Villere and Frenchmen [streets]...shots were fired from different guns," the statement read. "Immediately after the shooting, our officers saw three suspects running from the scene."
Two participants told the Los Angeles Times that the second line had strayed slightly from its originally planned path prior to the shooting.
One onlooker named Happy Acee told reporters that he and his party were about 50 feet away from the actual shooting.
"It sounded like there were six or seven shots that rang off, and we ended up hitting the deck...and literally people [were] just running over the top of us, just trying to get away."
Second line parades are notorious for being potentially dangerous events; violence from previous parties have rendered some residents wary of attendance.
One such resident, Shermaine Tyler, told The Times-Picayune that she didn't want to attend the event, for fear of potential violence.
"Me and [my] mom were going to the second line," she said. "I told her I didn't want to go because there are always shots at a second line."
The mayor stressed Sunday evening that he and his team were going to be "very, very aggressive," in the search for the perpetrators.
"These kinds of incidents are not going to go unanswered," he said. "There were hundreds of people out there today. So somebody knows who did this and the way we're going to stop the violence in this city is [by having] everybody come together."
