A woman was killed and seven other people were injured in a shooting at a car show during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in Fort Pierce, sheriff's officials said.
St. Lucie County Sheriff's deputies responded at around 5:20 p.m. Monday to the area of Avenue M and 13th Street, where shots rang out during the MLK Day celebration. Nearly 1,000 people were in attendance.
"There was a disagreement of some sort between two parties, and unfortunately they decided to resolve that with guns," Chief Deputy Brian Hester said.
The sheriff's office said one of the victims, a 30-year-old woman from Fort Pierce who had been at the event with her 6-year-old son, died Tuesday morning at the hospital. Family members identified as Nikkitia Bryan, WPTV reported.
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In addition to the eight victims, four other people suffered from non-gunshot wounds while trying to flee the scene.
“It was mass chaos, as you can imagine, when shots rang out," Hester said. “There were a thousand plus people here at the event, and as the shots rang out, people were just running in all directions."
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Suspect information or a motive were not available. The shooting remains under investigation.
“It’s really sad in a celebration of someone who represented peace and equality that a disagreement results in a use of guns and violence to solve that disagreement, and that’s what’s really sad to me about what happened here," Hester said. "And then so many innocent people who were injured or hurt and were not part of the disagreement as well.”
