A 10-year-old boy and a 21-year-old woman were killed and three other people were wounded in a shooting in Newark on Saturday evening, according to Newark officials.
Around 7 p.m., the police responded to a 911 call about a shooting near the corner of Chancellor Avenue and Leslie Street in the city’s South Ward, according to a statement from the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office.
There they found the boy and the woman, according to the statement. Both were taken to University Hospital in Newark, where they died.
The other victims, an 11-year-old boy and two men, ages 19 and 60, were stable as of Saturday, the statement said. The prosecutor’s office on Sunday did not provide information about the nature of their injuries.
Officials had not named the victims as of Sunday afternoon. The prosecutor’s office and Newark Police Department officials declined to say whether any arrests had been made or any persons of interest identified. Amir Jones, the Essex County sheriff, is offering a reward of up to $10,000 for any information about the shooting.
Ras J. Baraka, the mayor of Newark, called the killings “depraved and senseless.”
“There is no explanation on earth that could come close to justifying this shooting,” he said in a statement.
Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said in a statement that investigators had informed him about the shooting, and asked the public to pray for the victims and their families.
The violence comes as the city’s murder rate has dropped, moving toward record lows. There were 22 homicides in the city between Jan. 1 and Sept. 29, about a quarter as many as there were in all of 2015, according to the most recently available crime data.
The city has focused in recent years on targeting the root causes of crime, including by establishing an Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery. Last month, a federal judge praised Newark for the progress it has made in police training and reform since 2016, when a consent degree gave the federal government oversight of the police department to rein in excessive use of force and unconstitutional stops and searches. The judge said the department had changed so substantially that she was prepared to release the city from Justice Department supervision.
On Saturday night, detectives scanned the sidewalk on Chancellor Avenue, using flashlights to search for bullet casings. A liquor store had been cordoned off by police tape and orange cones as investigators inspected the storefront.
Lamont Vaughn, who works for the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery, stood nearby, talking with residents about the boy and the woman who had been killed.
He said Newark has made great strides toward driving down shootings.
But, Mr. Vaughn said, “if we lose one life, that’s one too many.”
You can fight violence, he said, “but it’s not something that is treated with one dose of medicine.”
Chelsia Rose Marcius is a criminal justice reporter for The Times, covering the New York Police Department.
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