On Q Professional Investigations

ATLANTA — Georgia is second in the nation for reported gun thefts.

A Channel 2 Action News investigation discovered that most of those guns are never recovered and wind up being used to commit more crimes.

In 2012, criminals stole about 13,000 guns from Georgia gun owners, and law enforcement officials told Channel 2’s Erica Byfield it’s only getting worse.

“That feeling, that dread, you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh,’” said Jack Knobloch.

It was a Thursday evening in 2013 when Knobloch felt choked by dread.

He was watching an ultimate Frisbee game at Atlanta’s Coan Park.

“We had a game of the week under the lights, so there was a whole group of 50 to 75 of us kind of out here watching the game,” Knobloch told Byfield.

A short time later he walked to his car.

“All my stuff was everywhere, except for the things that were no longer there,” Knobloch said.

Six people’s cars were broken into. Knobloch lost an iPod and GPS. Later in the evening an Atlanta police officer arrested Todd Hogens.

Police found a loaded .45-caliber Kimber Ultra Carry 2 in Hogens’ front pocket.

Within a matter of hours, investigators discovered it was the same weapon a former Henry County deputy reported stolen out of his personal truck 18 months earlier.

“It’s kind of scary knowing that it was a cop’s gun and it could have been used in a crime,” said Knobloch.

Channel 2 Action News gathered data from August 2012 to August 2013.

Byfield found hundreds of stolen weapons still on the streets of four metro counties.

At the top of the list was the City of Atlanta with 805 stolen guns, then Gwinnett with 337, DeKalb with 296, Cobb with 231, and Fulton with 191.

“Every gun has a story,” said ATF Atlanta Field Office Supervisory Special Agent Sonny Fields.

Fields told Byfield that last year alone, 12,602 guns were reported stolen in Georgia.

The most common guns snatched were pistols, revolvers and rifles.

“In the state of Georgia since 2010, just in the state of Georgia, there have been approximately 268 linkages between guns that were recovered and shooting incidents that occurred,” said Fields.

The most notable stolen gun in 2013 is probably the AK-47 that Michael Brandon Hill used at a school shooting in DeKalb.

Days after the shooting, which sent children running from their classrooms, police announced that Hill stole the weapon and 500 rounds of ammunition from his roommate.

Atlanta police are using the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, or NIBIN, to track recovered weapons, linking them back to crimes they were used in.

“They have been used in robberies, homicides; a lot of times someone who purchases a gun may not know that it was stolen, so that’s always something there,” said investigator Jennings Kilgore.

Atlanta police gave Byfield exclusive access to their gun vault.

Officials said there were about 10,000 guns in the vault.

Tags and black sharpie markings on the guns made it easy to spot the stolen ones.

Kilgore has test-fired and run at least 6,000 shell casings through the NIBIN system.

“The potential for linking a homicide to some other case and solving a homicide, that is the ultimate goal,” he said.

Channel 2 Action News wanted to know where most stolen guns are recovered and found a surprising answer.

In 2012, it was Marietta and Atlanta.

Most stolen guns in Georgia aren’t recovered for at least three years.

Police said it’s difficult to know just how many crimes are committed using stolen guns.

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BALTIMORE MD Nov 15 2013 – Baltimore City Police are turning up the heat as they crack down on a number of suspects wanted for murder and several shootings across the city.

Police continue to dismantle a notorious gang they say is terrorizing the city with crime. For the second time, police gear up and raid several homes in East Baltimore, taking associates of the Black Guerrilla Family into custody.

Rochelle Ritchie was with officers as they raided the home and took one of their targeted suspects into custody.

Baltimore City Police are not playing any games. They are taking down suspected criminals and BGF gang members and their associates across the city one at a time, any day at any hour.

Early Tuesday morning, WJZ rode along as officers conducted 11 search and seizure warrants in the Eastern District.

All of the search warrants were carried out at the same time. Of the 11 targets, two of them were wanted for murder.

Teamed up with undercover investigators, WJZ cameras roll as neighbors on Rutland Avenue are awakened to a loud bang, not from gunshots, but from a police ram rod.

The raid is a success. Police find their intended target. He’s placed in custody and taken to jail. Police say his fate is the same fate they plan to hand out to other wanted criminals.

Since 2010, the Oliver community has suffered through the loss of 11 lives due to gun violence and an additional 16 incidents in which people suffered non-fatal gunshot wounds,” said Dean Palmere, Deputy Commissioner, Baltimore City Police.

Six people were taken into custody during Tuesday’s raids.

The numerous raids across the city are in response to the bloodshed that has terrorized neighborhoods from east to west.

Just last week, the State’s Attorney’s Office handed down indictments to 48 alleged members of the Black Guerrilla Family, a gang who police blame for much of the senseless violence.

“In many areas of the city, BGF is known to fuel and reinforce its existence and dominance through the sale and distribution of narcotics, acts of violence and intimidation, the use of firearms and other serious crimes,” said Gregg Bernstein, State’s Attorney.

Tuesday’s raid turned up several drugs, including heroin and cocaine.

“The individuals that are within the community that are distributing the heroin and cocaine grew up in this community and are being influenced by BGF,” said Palmere.

City Police say the raids will be conducted at random until all those suspected of committing or assisting in crimes across the city are behind bars.

The State’s Attorney’s Office has indicted 68 people in the last five days.

WJZ

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A 16-year-old Pittsburgh boy was charged Wednesday night with attempted homicide after three students were shot near their high school just as students were streaming home for the day, authorities said.

All of the victims were described as stable or in good condition after the shootings, which occurred about two blocks from Brashear High School in the Beechview neighborhood of south Pittsburgh about 2:50 p.m. ET, police said.

Anjohnito “A.J.” Willet Jr. was charged as an adult with four counts each of attempted homicide, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment, Pittsburgh police Lt. Kevin Kraus told reporters late Wednesday.

Police and SWAT officers converged on two adjacent homes in the area and took Willet and six other people into custody for questioning, Kraus said WednesInvestigators believe Willet shot the three students and fired at a fourth in retaliation for his having been beaten during a drug-related robbery at the school Oct. 18, Kraus said. Willet declined to press charges at the time, telling police he preferred to take care of the matter himself, Kraus said.

Willet was also charged with illegal possession of a firearm by a juvenile.

“We believe we have the one and only shooter,” Kraus said, adding: “We have no evidence or information whatsoever to believe that there was anything else other than a targeted shooting directly resulting to an October 18 incident in the school amongst high school students.”day night. The six others, including a small infant, were released without charges.

Diane Richard, a Pittsburgh police spokeswoman, said two of the victims were shot in the shoulder and the foot and that one was grazed in the head. She said that two of them were 17 years old and that one was 16.

The boy who was injured in the head ran back to the school and was pulled inside by administrators, Richard said, which gave rise to inaccurate initial reports that the shootings had taken place on school property.

“There was no shooting at Brashear school,” she said.

The reports were “traumatizing,” a student at the school said.

“We were driving home from school, and all of a sudden, we heard three gunshots. This kid gets picked up. He was bleeding from his head. There was blood everywhere,” the student, who asked not to be named, told NBC station WPXI of Pittsburgh.

Krystal Henson, a senior at the school, told the station: “All I heard were gunshots. I just thought it was kids playing around. My friend said, ‘A kid is laying on the ground, and there is blood.’ Everyone started running.”

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An 18-year-old’s “birthday party gone wild” turned deadly when gunfire erupted at her Cypress, Texas, home overnight, killing two and injuring nearly two dozen others who were trying to escape the crowded house, authorities said.

Harris County Sheriff’s investigators responded to a call about shots fired at the home at approximately 10:50 p.m. on Saturday, Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia said today in a news conference.

Upon arriving, law enforcement officials described a chaotic scene rife with teenagers trying to escape the suburban residence, Garcia said. More than 100 people were inside the small, two-story home when one suspect fired his gun “in apparent celebration.”

“Let me describe the event last night as a birthday party gone wild,” he said.

“[It was] just one of those inexplicable, crazy things when someone decides to pull a pistol and discharge it in the air, and someone else who thinks it’s important to carry a pistol to a birthday party decides to pull theirs,” Garcia said.

At least 18 people at the party sustained gunshot wounds in their chests, legs and even hands as a result of the shooting, Garcia said. At least one partygoer has a broken leg from trying to escape from the house.

Two Cypress Springs High School students died — one at the scene and another at a hospital. Their names have not been made public, but one of the victims was a 16-year-old girl with a birthday rapidly approaching, and the other was an 18-year-old boy, Garcia said.

Investigators are seeking two suspects. There is no evidence that the two alleged gunmen — a 17-year-old and a 22-year-old — were engaged in a confrontation or even came to the party together, Garcia said.

While authorities received information about several partygoers who may have been involved with local gangs, Garcia said it was not “the contributing factor” in the investigation.

The birthday celebration was being touted on social media, which Garcia said may have contributed to its violent outcome.

“Anytime that you promote a birthday party on social media, you have no control over who to expect at your door,” Garcia said. “What it does indicate is that you’re saying to the social media world, ‘I don’t know who you are, but you’re invited.’ That’s not a good practice.”

Garcia said neither alcohol nor drugs appeared to be a factor in the case, but there was a bouncer checking guests at the door.

The girl’s mother was at the home at the time of the party and subsequent shooting. Garcia would not address whether criminal charges would be filed against the woman. The investigation is ongoing, he said.
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The family of a kidnapped Louisiana mother tracked down and killed the father of her child in the abandoned house where he was allegedly holding her prisoner, authorities said.

Bethany Arceneaux, 29, of Duson, La., was abducted in the parking lot of a daycare where she was picking up her 2-year-old at approximately 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Department Captain Kip Judice told ABCNews.com.

Witnesses saw the suspect, Scott Thomas, allegedly force Arceneaux into his white Buick LeSabre, before driving off, Lafayette Police Department spokesman Paul Mouton told ABCNews.com.

Thomas, 29, of Leonville, La., is the father of Arceneaux’s child, Judice said. The woman had a restraining order against Thomas, but Judice said he did not know when it was filed.

The child was left behind in the woman’s car, and was later taken into custody by the woman’s mother, Mouton said.

Later that evening, law enforcement officials found Thomas’ car near an abandoned sugarcane field in a rural area of Lafayette Parish, La., Judice said.

One of Arceneaux’s shoes was found in the car, while the other had been left in the parking lot of the daycare where she had been last seen.

Authorities searched the sugarcane field Wednesday night and all day Thursday, but to no avail, Judice said. The cane towers as high as eight feet tall and was “a brutal search area” for officials, he said.

It wasn’t until Friday morning, when Arceneaux’s family members conducted their own search in the same area that they came upon a secluded, abandoned house behind a cluster of trees.

The house was directly across the street from the field where Thomas abandoned his car, but only the home’s roof was visible from the road, Judice said.

“[The family] converged on a piece of property about a mile from where the car was found,” Judice said. “One of the family members heard what he thought was a scream.”

Arceneaux’s cousin approached the home, kicked in the door in and entered, Judice said. Inside, he found Thomas with the woman. Thomas then began stabbing Arceneaux, and a confrontation ensued.

“The cousin, who was armed, began firing several shots at Thomas,” Judice said. “After a couple of shots, [Arceneaux] was able to get free of him and they escorted her out of the house.”

Arcenaux suffered several stab wounds and was taken by ambulance to Lafayette General Medical Center, where she is in stable condition, Judice said. It is not known if Arceneaux had been stabbed before her cousin found her inside the home, officials said.

Meanwhile, officers who heard the gun shots fired surrounded the home, Judice said. Upon entering, they found Thomas’ lifeless body on the ground. He had sustained several gunshot wounds.

Thomas’ cause of death is not known, Judice said. An autopsy on the body will be conducted by Lafayette Parish Coroner Ken Odinet, but it is not known when it will take place.

ABC News’ attempts to reach Odinet were not immediately successful.

Thomas did not own the abandoned home, Judice said. At this point, there is no known connection between Thomas and the property’s owners.

Arceneaux told investigators that the home was the only place she remembers being held hostage, Judice said. She said she had not eaten or drunk anything since her abduction on Wednesday.

No charges have been filed against the man who shot Thomas, and it is unlikely that the man will be charged, Judice said.

“In the state of Louisiana, you have a right to protect yourself and others from imminent bodily harm,” he said. “We believe at this point, based on evidence and statements collected, that this guy was acting in defense of Ms. Arceneaux and thus, was within the state law.”

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Arnold Redmond was waiting for a dice game to start when gunshots rang out.

He hugged the wall, then dropped to the floor. It was chaos in the east-side Detroit barbershop where police said 20 to 30 people were gambling in a small back room on Wednesday when someone outside started shooting in with an assault rifle.

Police said the violence may have stemmed from an ongoing feud between an individual and people at the gambling party.

Redmond, shot in the buttocks and left leg, bolted across 7 Mile Road and took cover in a party store.

“I was too scared to feel anything,” the 65-year-old West Bloomfield retiree said.

A person of interest in the shooting — which left three dead and six others wounded — was taken into custody on an unrelated felonious assault charge, Detroit Police Chief James Craig said Thursday. He said the man was wearing body armor at the time of his arrest.

The Free Press is not identifying the man, who is 31, because he has not yet been arraigned on charges.

A source familiar with the investigation said the man was stopped by police after attempting to force an officer, driving an unmarked vehicle, into oncoming traffic on Rochester Road in Rochester Hills. The man was pulled over in Rochester and arrested just after midnight Thursday, police said.

Craig called the shooting at Al’s Place Barber Shop “urban terrorism.”

Craig said that police received a 911 call about shots being fired at the business at 5:47 p.m. Wednesday, and by 5:49 p.m., police were at the scene.

He said the investigation has revealed that a man pulled up in a vehicle and started firing at a truck with a high-powered rifle. At some point, the rear door of the shop opened and the shooter began firing inside the barbershop.

According to a spokeswoman for the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office, the three men killed in the shooting were: Bryan Williams, 29, Joezell Williams, 61, and Kevin Perryman, 40. All died from multiple gunshot wounds, according to the office.

As police investigate the crime, relatives are mourning their loved ones.

Charzell Shields, Joezell Williams’ daughter, said her father was the patriarch of their family. She called the crime senseless and asked for anyone with information to step forward and go to the police.

“It don’t make sense for people to be losing their lives daily,” Shields said.

Local gathering spot

Redmond said he has frequented the barbershop for the last 30 years. He described the shop as a local gathering spot where regulars come to hang out, get a haircut, or play low-stakes dice games with $5 and $10 bills.

“It’s more like a family,” Redmond said of the clientele. “Everybody knows everybody.”

On Tuesday, the day before the shooting, Redmond had taken his three children to the barbershop for haircuts. The next day, he stopped by to say hello to a relative when all hell broke loose. Redmond was standing at a snack counter talking to a friend, waiting to play a so-called crumb game — a $5 and $10 dice game — when the gunshots rang out.

“I just heard a barrage of gunfire,” Redmond recalled. “I hugged the wall and dropped to the floor. After that, everybody was trying to get out the door.”

Redmond got out. He ran to a restaurant, but it was locked. He then tried a party store, whose owner let him inside.

“I’m angry that it happened. I’m angry that people are dead,” said Redmond, who doesn’t believe the shooting involved “the barbershop or any of the people associated with it.”

Outside the shop on Thursday, a handful of playing cards could be seen among some leaves near the front door, and broken window glass from a vehicle was in the alley.

Saifur Rahman, 19, said he was working at a fish and chicken shop across 7 Mile at the time of the shooting. He heard a series of shots that sounded like they came from an automatic weapon.

Three people — all male, one older and two younger — ran into his shop and locked the outer door. Rahman was behind an interior door and they began pounding on that, telling him to let them in. He thought he was being robbed.

“It was scary, you know,” he said.

More investigation

At one point, investigators were searching for two Chevrolet Impalas — one white, one black.

Hamtramck police impounded a silver Impala riddled with bullet holes, but it’s unclear whether it is connected to the barbershop shooting.

Craig said police are working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office to determine whether the man in custody could be in violation of federal laws for being in possession of body armor.

U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said the federal government is working with the Detroit Police Department to solve the barbershop shooting through the so-called Detroit One partnership.

She said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives went to the scene to collect and analyze ballistics evidence. ATF spokesman Donald Dawkins said roughly 20 shell casings were collected.

Despite this recent spate of violence — including the barbershop shooting and the fatal shooting of a Wayne State University law student — Craig said homicides are down.

According to police, there have been 289 criminal homicides so far this year, down from 331 during the same time period in 2012.

“The senseless loss of life and the horror for the surviving victims should outrage all of us,” McQuade said. “This shooting is both depressing and motivating. We need to do all we can to prevent this kind of violence.”

Crime Stoppers is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case. Call 800-SPEAKUP (800-773-2587).

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The 20-year-old suspected in a New Jersey mall shooting was found dead early Tuesday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.

The body of Richard Shoop, 20, of Teaneck, was found in a storage area inside the Garden State Plaza Mall in Paramus about 3:20 a.m., about six hours after the terrifying incident began.

Authorities say the 22-caliber assault-style rifle he fired was legally registered to his brother and that Shoop had taken it without permission, squeezing off at least six shots inside the crowded mall.

Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli said the nutjob used all kinds of drugs and had a special fondness for Ecstasy.

“Hard drugs … everything,” Molinelli said. “MDMA [Molly] I think was his drug of choice.”Officials don’t believe Shoop – a pizza deliveryman with a history of drug abuse – intended to hurt anyone other than himself.

Shoop left behind a note suggesting the “end was coming,” Molinelli said. “That could mean going to jail, getting arrested, or it could mean suicide.”

The prosecutor said the gunman’s family also suspected trouble when his brother noticed his gun and motorcycle helmet were missing.

“[The brother] and his girlfriend started driving around looking at certain areas that [Shoop] might be,” Molinelli said.

“They heard on the radio about what was happening here with the active shooter. They suspected it was him. They came, they told us,” he said, adding that they didn’t confirm Shoop was the gunman until they found his body.

The developments concluded a frantic night that left shoppers panicked and scrambling – with the gunman terrorizing the huge mall by casually firing shots in the air.

The situation unfolded at about 9:20 p.m., when the Shoop, clad in black body armor and a biker helmet, taunted workers and shoppers as he squeezed the trigger.

“He was waving at people, doing wise-ass things,” said a worker at a mall kiosk who gave his name as Michael.

“People were running and screaming. I just ran. It happened so fast.”

The crazed gunman did not appear to target specific individuals, instead firing into the air and at security cameras.

“He didn’t take shots at anybody, he was just shooting in the air,” the worker said.

Another witness said the shooter was gently telling people that he wasn’t going to hurt anyone as he fired shots around them.

“He was just walking around the mall telling everybody that he was not going to hurt anybody,” said Samantha Davis, 20.

“He seemed very calm — like the f–king Halloween guy Michael Myers.”

Police worked to clear the two million square feet of mall, located about 15 miles northwest of Manhattan.

A massive manhunt followed the shooting. Cops in body armor swarmed the home in Teaneck, New Jersey, where they were greeted by a pit bull and a man brandishing a screwdriver.

Officials said there was only one confirmed shell casing recovered, but witnesses reported hearing multiple shots.

“I could hear the shots, they sounded like firecrackers going off one after the other,” said Mercedez Heggs, of Clifton, New Jersey.

Heggs, who works at the Uniqlo clothing store, said that security acted quickly to address the situation.

“I made sure to get all my people out off the store then we started running out of the mall with our hands up along with everyone else,” she said.

“Hordes of people in the mall were screaming and running. I didn’t see any blood or injuries thank God.”

Another worker at Uniqlo said they used the bank across the way to hide from the shots.

“We just dropped our things and got going,” said Andrew Flores, 24. “We ran towards Bank of America across the street and used it as a base.

A massive police presence swarmed the mall, as they tried to apprehend the shooter.

“I’ve never seen this many cops before,” Flores said. “There are hundreds of them here. The guy was wearing body armor. It’s insane. This is such a scary situation.”

Inside the Nordstrom close to where the shooting occurred, shoppers and employees huddled inside a stock room for safety.

A Nordstrom employee, however, told The Post that no one in the store was injured.

“Everyone is good,” the employee said. “We’re just waiting for the police to clear us so we could go home.”

The mall will remain closed Tuesday.
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When Absalom Jordan hears the crack of gunfire outside his home in Southeast Washington, he reacts in an instant. “You get away from the windows and get down,” the 72-year-old said. “I have learned to live with it.”

Police are listening as well. Rooftop sensors monitor his neighborhood around the clock for the distinctive bang of a gun. The inconspicuous devices have logged hundreds of incidents over the past eight years near his apartment as part of a gunfire surveillance network called ShotSpotter.

About 39,000 separate incidents of gunfire have been documented by ShotSpotter’s unseen web of at least 300 acoustic sensors across 20 square miles of the city, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. The data, obtained through a public-records request, offer an unprecedented view of gun crime in a city where shooting a firearm is illegal in virtually all circumstances.

The gunfire logged by ShotSpotter overshadows the number of officially reported felony gun crimes by more than 2 to 1. More than one-half of the incidents detected by the network have involved multiple rounds of gunfire. In 2009 alone, ShotSpotter captured more than 9,000 incidents of gunfire. That number has fallen by 40 percent in recent years as gun homicides have declined sharply.

The system has been helpful to law enforcement, but no one claims that it captures every shot. The network covers only a third of the city, focusing on the police districts with the most violent crime. It occasionally misses gunfire because of circumstances that can cloak acoustic signatures, such as the canyonlike structures of an urban landscape. Some sounds, such as fireworks, can be mistaken for gunfire, although technology and human review help weed out false positives.

When ShotSpotter’s remote monitors — microphones and circuitry in a weatherproof shell — detect a loud noise, a central computer program analyzes the acoustic signature, providing a more accurate location than people usually can. It classifies the source, pinpoints the suspected location to within a few yards and notifies police. City personnel verify the alert and dispatch officers.

“ShotSpotter gives you a specific location,” said Kristopher Baumann, president of the D.C. police union. “You can go there and get out of the car. You can find a victim or shell casings.”

ShotSpotter’s coverage is most extensive in the eastern half of the city. By quadrant, the network has captured 18,700 incidents in Southeast, 10,600 incidents in Northeast, 6,400 in Northwest and 1,600 in Southwest, which is primarily waterfront and contains large stretches of undeveloped industrial areas. The network has logged an additional 1,600 shootings along the edges of the city.

Weather appeared to influence the pattern. The month of February had the fewest incidents, and July had the most. Work schedules also played a role. By day of the week, Saturday, Sunday and Friday had the most and Wednesday the fewest. As did sleep: The quietest hour was from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m.

A disproportionate number of incidents, about a third, have been logged on and around New Year’s Day and July 4. Much of this, officials said, is likely the result of celebratory gunplay.

The District is the biggest client of SST of Newark, Calif., which produces ShotSpotter. It’s also the only city in the region to use the system, although Prince George’s County police are testing it. Other companies provide listening technology for gunfire, but SST says it is the only one that can pinpoint shots over wide areas.

District officials praise the system.

“It is a valuable tool that provides almost instantaneous alerts that allow officers to be dispatched quicker for the sound of gunshots,” Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said in a written statement. “It has also been instrumental in determining crime trends and establishing information in investigations.”

The system can help police identify turf battles between gangs or other gun-related crime affecting particular neighborhoods, said Cmdr. James Crane, ShotSpotter program manager.

The gunshot detection technology, advocates said, also helps law enforcement address two problems: People misidentify sounds, such as cars backfiring, as gunshots, and true gunfire often goes unreported. ShotSpotter officials said that studies among clients elsewhere have found that about four out of five gunfire incidents are never reported to police.

The company guarantees that the system will capture at least 80 percent of all audible, outdoor gunfire in coverage zones, but company officials said they typically achieve a rate of 90 to 95 percent.

ShotSpotter’s inventory of shooting incidents provides another measure of gun-related crime in the District. In May, The Post reported that more than 28,000 firearms, mostly handguns, have been confiscated by D.C. police since 2000, though in smaller numbers in recent years.

The gunfire documented by ShotSpotter — an average of 17 incidents a day in the District since 2009 — offers a fuller view of the “pyramid” of gun violence, said Daniel Webster, who directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore.

“At the top, you have the incidents when someone dies. Then you have those when somebody gets wounded,” Webster explained.

The biggest category of gun violence, he said, is also the most underreported and poorly documented: when a shooter misses the target or shoots to intimidate.

“It gives a much better picture of how prevalent gun violence is,” Webster said.

BALLOONS AND A PIANO

ShotSpotter grew out of one man’s concern about gun violence on the West Coast in the early 1990s.

An engineer and expert in acoustic sciences, Robert Showen, then in his early 50s, was working at a research institute in Menlo Park, Calif. Showen said he was troubled by the deadly gang wars in nearby East Palo Alto.

“I thought, with my knowledge I can do something,” Showen said.

He said he asked local police whether a system to detect gunfire could help fight crime. They directed him to scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey who were working to apply earthquake location systems to gunfire. Their research showed promise, Showen said, but they had not figured out how to apply it to an urban environment in real time.

Showen experimented: He set microphones atop a piano in his living room and connected them to a laptop outfitted with software that he and a business partner wrote. Using a child’s clicker toy, he made a noise to see whether the software could detect where the sound originated. He conducted the same test outdoors, popping balloons at various spots in his yard. His system worked.

In the mid-1990s, he took his idea to police in nearby Redwood City, Calif., who became the first to deploy ShotSpotter. Contracts soon followed in Los Angeles County and Glendale, Ariz. Showen is now chief scientist for SST and co-holds a patent on the technology. Today, 65 police agencies use ShotSpotter in the United States, as do police in Rio de Janeiro. It’s also being tested in a South African safari park to see whether it can help identify illegal rhinoceros poaching.

The District began using ShotSpotter in late 2005 after the FBI gave the city the opportunity to test the technology. A federal grant paid $2 million to place sensors across the 7th Police District in Southeast Washington.

“The 7th District was selected for ShotSpotter because it led the city in homicides,” said Joel Maupin, who was police commander of the district and has since retired.

The technology enabled officers to respond to shootings more quickly. It became a safety issue. In short order, the department had to revise its dispatch policy to ensure that officers knew whether the report of gunfire came from ShotSpotter or from a person who thought he heard a gunshot, said former D.C. police chief Charles Ramsey.

“Because the odds [with ShotSpotter] of finding a person armed was a lot higher than with a normal 911 call,” Ramsey said. “It could distinguish cars backfiring from gunshots.”

In 2007, the District assumed ownership of the detection system, expanding its coverage in the years that followed. ShotSpotter now reaches into six of the seven police districts and covers about one-third of the city. Its greatest coverage is in Southeast and Northeast, records show.

Over the past six years, the city has spent about $3.5 million to maintain and expand the system, records show.

ShotSpotter is also linked to a system of closed-circuit cameras, which police hope will capture the aftermath of shootings in real time. To guard against vandalism, officials do not publicize the sensors’ appearance or reveal their locations.

‘GET THE COP TO THE DOT’

Wrapped in a weatherproof container roughly the size of a watermelon, each ShotSpotter sensor combines microphones, hardware, software and a clock linked to the Global Positioning System, which uses satellites and radio navigation to pinpoint precise times and locations.

In the cacophonous urban environment, sensors are calibrated to ignore all sounds except for those that most closely match the “impulsive” sound of an explosion, said James Beldock, a senior vice president for ShotSpotter.

“It’s a very, very sharp wave,” Beldock said. “No other sound works that way.”

The blast of a gun is different from other explosive sounds because it is directional, meaning that the noise changes its frequency as the bullet moves through space. A person may hear a gunshot a half-mile away if the gun is fired toward him. But a person 200 yards away may hear nothing if the gun is fired away from him.

Once sensors register a potential gunshot, they transmit the data to the ShotSpotter computer network for analysis. The computer server compares the time that each sensor logged the sound to calculate the likely location of its source, a process of triangulation and multilateration.

“That sound will reach a sensor 100 yards away at a different time than it reaches a sensor 200 yards away,” Beldock explained.

The more sensors that capture the noise, the more accurate the location. A sound detected by 10 sensors can be located to within two feet, he said.

The computer system also classifies the likely source of the sound based on its sharpness, frequency and consistency across sensors. This is critical, because other impulsive sounds — including fireworks, backfires and helicopters — can also trigger the remote sensors.

Pile drivers, for example, initiate an alert because the machinery is elevated and the noise radiates over a long distance, Beldock said. But it can often be filtered out.

“The pile driver does not sound like gunfire in one critical respect: The frequency component, the pitch of the sound is not right,” Beldock said.

The software will try to determine whether the source of the gunfire was in motion and might have been a drive-by.

After the network classifies the sound, a person will review it. “The job of the review team is to use their knowledge of other things that the computer is not yet good enough to do,” he said.

A reviewer will listen to the sound and visually inspect its wave on a monitor. A gun blast looks like a Christmas tree tipped over on its right side: “The bushier the tree, the more likely it is to be a gunshot,” he said.

Fireworks are among the most difficult sounds to discern, but they can often be identified because, unlike gunfire, the intensity of the explosion is the same in all directions. Some of these invariably slip through. In April, ShotSpotter logged 39 gunfire incidents in the middle of the Washington Channel during the Cherry Blossom Festival fireworks display.

A reviewer will also try to determine whether the gunfire came from an automatic weapon and whether more than one gun was fired. “The musical analogy is that if the rhythm is not completely even, then it’s likely to be multiple shooters,” Beldock said.

In the District, city personnel review alerts. For many other cities using a different version of the ShotSpotter network, that work is done by company personnel in a command center in Newark, Calif. They pass additional information gleaned from maps or satellite photos to local dispatchers.

The entire process of detection through review for ShotSpotter personnel takes less than 40 seconds, on average. Once a gunshot is verified, police are dispatched. ShotSpotter officials call this “get the cop to the dot.”

D.C. police declined requests to demonstrate the system. Since its installation, police have not publicized the amount of gunfire captured by the network in their annual reports. And they said they do not track arrests made as a result of ShotSpotter’s alerts.

Nationwide, criminologists say they are not aware of recent academic research on the effectiveness of such systems. A 2011 study commissioned by the company found that seven agencies using its technology reported better shooting response times and more efficient investigations.

For investigators in the District, ShotSpotter played a key role in a high-profile 2007 shooting in which an off-duty D.C. police officer killed a 14-year-old boy on a stolen minibike. ShotSpotter’s audio captured gunfire from two sources, evidence that police said indicated that someone other than the officer fired first. That conclusion provided a strong defense for the officer. A department review said the police use of force was justified and that the officer did not violate department policy. The family sued the District, which ultimately paid a settlement to end the case.

ShotSpotter information is “not frequently used at trials” but has helped prosecutors establish the number or sequence of shots, the time of gunfire and whether more than one gun was fired, said William Miller, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office.

Prosecutors said the technology helped win a voluntary manslaughter conviction in the slaying of 20-year-old Deuante Ray in the early morning of Oct. 30, 2009. Prosecutors called it a “difficult circumstantial evidence case.”

A gunman shot Ray in the head and chest, killing him in an alley behind the 1100 block of 48th Street NE. A witness last saw Ray entering the alley that night with Terrell Patton. Patton denied shooting Ray but admitted that he lent Ray his cellphone.

Records showed that two calls were made from the phone that night. The second call by Ray, to his girlfriend, ended about 12:35 a.m. ShotSpotter detected a gunshot in the alley about 15 seconds after the call ended. That, prosecutors said, was one of the shots that killed Ray. Patton, they said, lured Ray into the alley and shot him.

“Technology provided key evidence,” prosecutors noted.

A VIRTUAL CLOUD OF GUNFIRE

The thousands of incidents logged by ShotSpotter stress one fact: Many D.C. residents can’t escape the crack of gunshots, though they have become less frequent, falling to 5,385 in 2012. The Post plotted eight years of incidents on a map of the city, using the latitude and longitude of each.

A cloud of virtual gunfire emerges, flecked by hot spots.

In Northeast, the neighborhood surrounding Clay Terrace has been subjected to 302 incidents in the five years since 2008. In 2009, the number peaked at 129. Last year, it dwindled to 17. The area is home to a public housing complex flanked by the Arts and Technology Academy and Marvin Gaye Park.

Greg Stewart, who lives nearby and serves on the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission, noted the change.

“Right now, you don’t really hear complaints,” said Stewart, who said he was aware of ShotSpotter from news reports and had noticed an increased police presence in the area.

In Northwest, where ShotSpotter’s coverage is more limited, a portion of the Columbia Heights neighborhood east of Georgia Avenue between Princeton Place and Lamont Street experienced 299 incidents over the past five years. The number peaked at 99 in 2009, dropping to 46 last year.

Southeast has the greatest number of hot spots. It also has the greatest ShotSpotter coverage.

ShotSpotter has captured 329 incidents in a part of the Washington Highlands neighborhood near the 4300 block of Fourth Street SE, just north of the Maryland border.

“There were times when I was awakened by shots. Shootings are a constant thing in my area,” said Jordan, the 72-year-old who lives there and is a member of the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission. In August, a man was shot to death in front of a nearby apartment.

A few miles away in Southeast, ShotSpotter has recorded a surge in shootings this year along Bruce Place, a short residential street on the edge of Fort Stanton Park. In the first half of the year, sensors had logged 63 incidents, 22 of them involving multiple rounds of gunfire. In all of last year there were only 45.

“The amount of gunfire in this area highlights the challenges we are facing and addressing,” D.C. police Cmdr. Robin Hoey said. Police did not provide an explanation for the increase.

Over the eight years of its operation in the District, ShotSpotter has logged more than 50 incidents each within a quarter mile of a dozen schools during weekdays.

In Northeast, for example, ShotSpotter recorded 94 shootings within a quarter mile of the Friendship Blow Pierce Junior Academy on 19th Street since 2008. The shootings occurred between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. on school days.

“We hear about the incidents. But when we are inside the school, we don’t have a sense of violence,” said Patricia Brantley, the chief operating officer of Friendship Public Charter School, which runs the Blow Pierce Junior Academy.

Some gunfire still escapes ShotSpotter’s net.

The Post identified about a dozen gun homicides that took place outdoors in the coverage area that the system failed to detect. ShotSpotter officials and police confirmed the findings.

On Clay Terrace NE, ShotSpotter missed a high-profile shootout on Oct. 13, 2009, that left two dead and three wounded. Gunmen opened fire shortly before 4 p.m. on a group of people standing in a courtyard between two buildings. Some in the crowd drew guns and returned fire, records show.

“I heard about 30 gunshots, and it sounded like three different guns,” Darryl Profit, who was inside his house a half-block away, told The Post at the time. Another witness likened the fusillade to a “war.” Police at a school nearby also heard the gunshots.

When the system appears to miss a shooting, “there is a very formal and rigorous review,” said Crane, the ShotSpotter manager for D.C. police.

Officials have worked with ShotSpotter to fill any gaps in coverage, installing additional sensors as needed.

Certain circumstances can thwart detection, officials said.

If a silencer is used or shots are fired into a car and the vehicle absorbs the acoustic energy of the blast, the sound may elude the sensors, said Ralph Clark, ShotSpotter’s chief executive. The same is true, he said, for an “execution style” shooting in which the gun is inches away from the victim. He also said that gunfire in a canyonlike area could be clouded by ambient noise.

“We don’t offer a 100 percent ironclad guarantee to capture 100 percent of all the shootings,” Clark said. “What we provide is a lot of gunshot intelligence that otherwise would not be attainable by any agencies.”

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A young organization in Boston works to prevent sisters, girlfriends, and wives from becoming unwitting accomplices to shootings, and spreads awareness in the process.

Jessica Davis’s oldest son spent ten years in jail for shooting another man. She herself was questioned by police over a gun that, to this day, she believes her daughter bought and hid for a boyfriend.* So for Davis, joining Boston’s “Operation LIPSTICK,” which launched in April 2012, was personal.

Ladies Involved in Putting a Stop to Inner-City Killings is the product of a partnership between Boston’s Citizens for Safety and the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, with grant money from the U.S. Department of Justice. Leaders of the organization say they aim to educate women about the dangers of “buying, concealing, storing, and holding” guns on behalf of men in their lives who, because of felony records, are prohibited from purchasing firearms themselves.

Buying a gun for such an individual is called “straw purchasing,” and it’s illegal.

The chief harm of straw purchasing, of course, is putting a gun straight from the purchaser’s hands into those of an individual who intends to use it to commit a crime. But straw purchasing also plays a significant role in the gunrunning industry: A Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms study found that 46 percent of all firearms trafficking investigations between 1996 and 1998 involved straw purchasers. The same study found that 18 percent of straw purchasers were girlfriends or spouses. The Chicago Sun-Times reported in 2012 that the University of Chicago Crime Lab studies suggest women purchase nearly a fourth of the guns that are recovered in Chicago crimes within a year of purchase.

Across the country women are being arrested for straw purchasing. Stevie Marie Vigil, a 22-year-old Colorado woman, was indicted in August of knowingly transferring a firearm to a convicted felon, who used the gun to kill Colorado prison chief Tom Clements. Vigil now faces a possible ten-year sentence in federal prison. Last month in Pennsylvania, Megan Ryan Boyle, another 22-year-old woman, was charged with purchasing guns for her boyfriend, also a convicted felon. She and 21 year-old Stacie Dawson,who is also from Pennsylvania and was charged with buying two handguns illegally for her boyfriend, are among the first to face new stiffer penalties of up to five years in prison for straw purchasing under their state’s new “Brad Fox Law,” named after a Philadelphia-area police officer who was shot and killed by an illegally purchased gun. And in 2008 when Chicago police arrested Ohmari L. Sengstacke, a convicted felon found outside then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s home, the .40-caliber handgun stowed in his car turned out to have been purchased by his wife.

Some women may be unaware that buying a gun for a boyfriend, brother, or cousin could destroy their own lives with jail time or the homicide of someone they know and love.

“I didn’t even know what straw purchasing was,” said Davis. But she found out quickly when the police found a handgun under her car and asked her to testify in court about its origins. Today, Davis and her daughter give differing accounts of the gun’s origin. Davis’s daughter, now 22, admits to having bought a gun in her teenage years, but says it was for her own protection—not a straw purchase—and it wasn’t the one the police found: that one “was from something going on in the area,” stashed under the car by someone else. Davis continues to think her daughter is covering for someone.

Inner-city women like Davis are painfully aware of the toll of gun violence. Young inner-city men—their sons, brothers, and boyfriends—are the most common victims of gun-related homicides in America. A church yard near my home in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston, is filled with flags representing the number of people killed or wounded in gun violence in the Boston area so far this year. Victims of gun violence in the Boston area this year alone far outnumber the casualties of the Boston Marathon bombing.

The LIPSTICK organizers note their focus on women is a solution that does not require legislation, which even in the wake of the Newtown shootings has so far proved impossible to pass.

Straw purchasing is becoming more of a target for other organizations and for law enforcement as well. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, based in Newtown, has partnered with the The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in a campaign with the message , “Buy a gun for someone who can’t … buy yourself 10 years in jail.” The ATF includes information on recognizing straw purchasers in online trainings for police officers, gun retailers, as well as at the U.S. gun industry’s largest annual trade show: the SHOT show.

Boston’s Citizens for Safety, the roughly 10,000-member organization responsible for launching LIPSTICK, debuted its “Where Do the Guns Come From” project in 2007, but LIPSTICK was borne from its leaders’ “ah-ha” moment a year and a half ago, when they connected the dots between studies that showed women are frequently recruited to illegally buy guns with similar anecdotal evidence they were hearing in the field.

“These women are sometimes in dysfunctional relationships where there is a power imbalance or exploitation or threatening,” said Curtis Ellis, the communications director for Citizens for Safety. “Or they are simply poor and do not understand what they are being asked to do is illegal and can land them in prison and could be directly responsible for putting guns on the streets that can kill their own family members.”

Young women can feel they are buying the guns for their boyfriend, brother or cousin as a tool for mutual protection, particularly if they live in an area where guns are commonplace, said Garen Wintemute, a professor at University of California-Davis and director of the university’s Violence Prevention Research Program. For several years he did research at gun shows wearing a hidden camera. “One learns very quickly [that] straw purchases are often done by women,” he said.

At one gun show, Wintemute witnessed a woman, accompanied by a man, get turned away by a gun dealer after he asked her a few basic questions about the weapon she was looking for and she was speechless.

“The manager said, ‘Get out of here, this is a straw purchase,’” said Wintemute, who then saw the same woman, the male companion still at her side, buy a gun from a different dealer ten minutes later.

“Looking at our records anecdotally and empirically it is young men doing the shooting,” Jake Wark, spokesperson for the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office, said. But there is a problem, he said, in the “small subset of the female public who are willing to take a role in obtaining those firearms or holding on to them, knowing they are less likely to be frisked, subject [to] a search warrant or to catch the eye of an officer.”

So why has this issue largely flown under the radar until now? Possibly because from 2003 until 2010 the Tiahrt Amendments, which were passed by Congress with pressure from the gun lobby, prohibited the ATF from releasing information, even to researchers, on where a gun used in a crime had come from. The Centers for Disease Control have also been prohibited from researching firearms-related injuries since 1996. But some change lies ahead. In one of the 23 executive actions President Obama issued after the Newton school shooting, he directed the C.D.C. “to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.”

At a recent Operation LIPSTICK meeting, Kim Odom, a pastor who has become a prominent anti-violence activist in Boston, launched a training workshop by reading a passage from her son’s journal.

“It’s a shame that some people get killed or shot every day. What we really need is peace,” wrote 13-year-old Steven Odom shortly before he was killed in a shooting near his home in 2007.

The dozen women and some men in the room shook their heads. Many have lost a son, brother, or friend to shots fired in surrounding neighborhoods.

“What Steven was articulating is a public health epidemic,” Odom said. And just like any public health epidemic, she said, the source of the problem must be identified.

After every shooting, Odom tells the workshop participants, there’s a question that must be asked: “Where did the gun come from?” Odom and another leader, Ruth Rollins, who also lost a son in a shooting, have been asking women to tweet that question after every shooting in the area, and to spread it in a cell phone video. They want this question to go viral.

They spread their message where women can be found, from churches, hair and nail salons and community events and even domestic violence shelters. They exchange stories, hold workshops, and ask women to sign pledges to never illegally buy or hide guns. One of their members is a Mary Kay lady who spreads the word as she peddles cosmetics and facial cleansers.

Outreach to women is “an incredibly useful and innovative way of tackling one part of the [gun] problem,” said David Hemenway, a Harvard School of Public Health professor who directs the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and wrote the book Private Guns, Public Health. He compared the initiative to past public health campaigns to reduce reckless and drunk driving. “It needs to be made clear, like in ‘Friends don’t let Friends Drive Drunk,’ that a good boyfriend does not ask you to do things that can destroy your whole life.”

The comparison to anti-drunk driving campaigns is an apt one. It was another women’s group, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, that led the charge in that campaign as well.

The women of LIPSTICK may have a long way to go, but officials and organizers in Chicago, Milwaukee, and the Bay Area have begun contacting them for advice on setting up similar programs.

Christy Taylor, a 55-year-old paralegal, felt fragile at the LIPSTICK workshop. She would pause to dab her eyes as they welled with tears. She had just marked nine years since her eldest son was gunned down at the age of 21. And his birthday was coming up.

“I came to make a difference in our communities for our children who are survivors,” she said. Her son left behind a daughter named Jadaya. She is now 14 and wants to start an organization for kids like her and call it “Where is My Dad?”

Taylor said she plans to bring Jadaya to the next Operation LIPSTICK meeting.

That fits in with Odom’s plans. As she told the group, “We are going to have to build an army.”

*The names of some individuals in this story have been changed.

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RIDGECREST, Calif. — Police were investigating a deadly shooting in this Mojave Desert city when they got a chilling call — from the killer.

Sergio Munoz said he wanted to deliver a “package” to police and to kill officers, but to avoid being outgunned at the station he would instead “wreak havoc” elsewhere.

Munoz kept his word Friday during a nearly hour-long chase. With two hostages in the trunk of his car, Munoz sped along some 30 miles of desert highway, taking shots at passing motorists and trying to run oncoming cars off the road before police killed him.

Investigators were puzzling over what triggered the rampage by Munoz, 39, whose criminal record stretched back at least two decades.

There were signs his life was unraveling. He was arrested last Sunday and Ridgecrest police have said he lost his job recently. A woman who knew him said he was using and dealing heroin.

The violence began at about 5:15 a.m. Friday when police responded to a call at a home where Munoz had been staying. They found a woman shot to death and a man wounded.

Dawn Meier, the sister of the wounded man, told The Associated Press that Munoz had been staying at her brother’s house for about two weeks. She said her brother, Thaddeus Meier, told her Munoz was a friend he wanted to help out but that Munoz had been using and dealing black tar heroin.

She moved out of the house a week ago to join her boyfriend, who lived next door, after he insisted she get her 7-month-old son away from the drugs.

Her boyfriend, Derrick Holland, said on Thursday he heard Munoz complaining in the yard about how his life was falling apart and he was losing everything “due to drugs.”

Early Friday morning, Munoz showed up and told Thaddeus Meier, “We’re going to reduce all of the snitches in town,” Dawn Meier said, recounting what her brother said from the hospital where he was being treated for gunshot wounds.

When her brother declined, Munoz shot him at least twice, then shot and killed Meier’s girlfriend. Her identity has not been released.

Later that morning, Munoz called a police officer on his cellphone, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said at a press conference. Munoz said he had a package for police and wanted to come to the station and “kill all the officers but they had too many guns,” Youngblood said.

Police now believe the “package” was the hostages.

Nearly two hours later, a sheriff’s deputy spotted Munoz’s car and a pursuit began through the shrub-dotted desert about 150 miles north of Los Angeles. Munoz ran traffic off the road, firing at least 10 times at passing vehicles with a shotgun and a handgun.

No motorists were hurt, Youngblood said.

At one point during the chase, Munoz pulled over and the car’s trunk popped open, revealing a man and woman inside. They appeared to shut the trunk, the sheriff said. Munoz got back in the car and sped off.

In the end, Munoz pulled over again on U.S. 395, turned in his seat and began shooting into the trunk. As many as seven officers opened fire and killed him.

The hostages were flown to a hospital in critical condition, but were expected to survive. Their names have not been released and police have not said anything about their relationship to Munoz.

Munoz is a felon with convictions dating back to 1994, when he was sentenced to more than two years in prison for receiving stolen property. In May, he was arrested for possessing ammunition as a felon, but the felony charge was dismissed.

Munoz was most recently arrested Sunday for investigation of possessing controlled substance paraphernalia and a felony charge of possessing ammunition as a felon. Dawn Meier said police found a syringe at the home where the slaying would happen five days later.

Ridgecrest is a city of about 27,000 people adjacent to the vast Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, which sprawls over more than 1,700 square miles of desert. U.S. 395 runs through the western Mojave, below the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada.

Ridgecrest Mayor Dan Clark called the incident disturbing, especially because the small city is relatively crime free.

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