CLEVELAND — In just eight hours, Cleveland Police say they responded to 600 calls between the night of July 4 and the morning of July 5. About 400 of those calls were in the city's southeast Fourth District.
"On a night like this, you're responding to call to call to call to call. And you're not having the opportunity to just patrol your sector, patrol your zone," said Chief Annie Todd.
During a press conference Monday afternoon, the chief addressed several incidents that put a strain on the department's resources.
Block party on Miles Road
The first major event occurred the night of July 4, when an illegal block party ended in fireworks catching fire and fights breaking out on Miles Road.
Police said the city previously denied a permit for a large holiday event between E 110th and E 120th streets, but residents decided to still hold the block party anyway.
An estimated 500 people were in attendance. Police responded to reported fighting around 11:30 p.m. Friday. In the chaos, one officer was bitten by someone, and another injured his hand.
Man and woman shot on Fullerton
Around 3 a.m. on Saturday, police received a ShotSpotter alert in the 6900 block of Fullerton Avenue. Upon arrival, officers found 30-year-old Leonard Brown and 29-year-old Briauna Green had both been fatally shot. Police are looking for suspects connected to the double homicide.
Buckeye Avenue killing
At about 4:15 a.m. on Saturday, officers received a call about shots fired and ShotSpotter alerts in the area of East 115th Street and Buckeye Avenue, police said.
When the officers arrived, they found hundreds of people and cars trying to flee the area throughout Buckeye Plaza and the surrounding streets, police said.
The scene was chaos:
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Police said cars started speeding off when they arrived.
As officers started clearing the crowd, a man who police say is about 21 years old was wounded by gunshots and pronounced dead on the scene.
Four other gunshot victims, whose ages ranged from 18 to 21, both women and men, were taken to local hospitals by private vehicles.
Investigators found two guns in the bushes at the scene. They also recovered a vehicle at a local hospital with another two firearms.
No arrests have been made in connection with the homicides. Police said investigators are combing through surveillance video and social media to find leads. They're also asking for anyone with information to call the homicide unit or Crime Stoppers.
Meantime longtime Buckeye neighbors like Bob Render told News 5 he’s disappointed.
“This makes no sense. Tearing up on your neighborhood,” said Render.
Even New Era Cleveland Chairman Fahiem, or Antoine Tolbert, said he’s disappointed to see his community being destroyed after this past weekend’s chaos and gun violence in Cleveland left three people dead.
“Two of my friends lost their children over this past weekend based off what happened, so anytime a life is lost, I have a personal problem,” said Tolbert. “Innocent people lost their life just going to a car meet-up. That shouldn’t be the case.”
Todd explained that the officers in Cleveland's Fourth District called for help from the other districts in responding to the high call volume.
She said staffing was not necessarily an issue, but the department simply did not have the resources to be everywhere at once.
“It doesn’t matter if we had hundreds of officers out there," said Todd. "When you’re getting this many calls for service throughout the city in an 8-hour period, all of the police we have here couldn’t control what was happening.”
Still, Render said it is frustrating because he said this violence hurts how the community is viewed.
“This is disheartening because it causes people to pause and think well, should I really tie my money up in a place like Buckeye, when I can go somewhere else and don’t have to worry about my place being broken into?” said Render.
In addition to the Friday and Saturday calls, police said a crowd of vehicles caused issues early Monday morning. The department's car meet-up detail responded to Harvard Avenue and E 175th Street, where investigators said motorcycles from a bar's bike night were speeding through the streets.
Several citations were issued there, and bikes were towed.
