Five people and an unborn child were found dead in Indianapolis on Sunday in what the city’s mayor called an act of mass murder.
Although the names and ages of the victims were not disclosed and a motive was not immediately known, Mayor Joe Hogsett said the shooting brought ‘terror to our community’.
“This morning, the city of Indianapolis was targeted with a depravity that has become all too common in the country and that will never stop shocking the conscience,” he told reporters.
Hogsett added that evidence gathered so far suggested the killings were not related to the “deadly confluence of guns, drug abuse and poverty” in Indianapolis that he said officials had been talking about for years.
Police found the first victim, a young man, at about 4 a.m. local time suffering gunshot wounds in an area northeast of downtown Indianapolis, a police spokesman told reporters. Officers later found the bodies of five people in a house less than a mile away.
A pregnant woman was taken to a local hospital where she and her unborn child were pronounced dead, the spokesman said. The juvenile was expected to survive.
It was not immediately clear how the victims were connected, although Randal Taylor, chief of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police, told reporters that the incident did not appear to be random.
No suspect was identified, he said, and there was possibly more than one shooter.