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PrintCOLUMBIA — An early evening shooting at Douglass Park offered few leads Wednesday: two gunshot victims, few cooperating witnesses and little description of a perpetrator, Columbia police said.
The two victims, an 18-year-old man with a gunshot wound to his upper leg and a 25-year-old man with a gunshot wound to his ankle, arrived on their own at University Hospital, Sgt. Ken Hammond said.
“It appeared to start out as a fist fight and during the fight someone pulled out a (small caliber handgun),” Hammond said.
As police headed to the scene around 6:35 p.m. in response to the fight, they began to receive calls of shots fired, Hammond said.
Police arrived just in time to see hundreds of people flee, Hammond said.
“When people start firing in an incident like this people tend to scatter and run,” Hammond said. “It’s not uncommon for people to start calling CrimeStoppers within hours of the incident.”
Police are currently looking for the shooter.
Hammond said he would not release the names of the victims and said he did not know if the fight and subsequent shooting was gang-related.
“We’re really early on in our investigation,” Hammond said. “This isn’t going to be settled tonight. We’re talking to our victims. We’re not getting useful information at this point.”
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