'Just Kids Fighting' - Then a Gun: Police Chief Lawrence Revell Gives His Fullest Account of the Perry Street Mass Shooting

Tallahassee Police Chief Lawrence Revell gave his fullest account yet of the October 24 mass shooting on Perry Street in remarks at a prayer vigil on Thursday, October 29, at Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church on Tuskegee Street, where about 50 community members gathered for the victims. Shortly after Florida A&M's homecoming game ended, he said, a fight broke out among several young people just outside the stadium on Perry Street. That fight broke up, another followed, and within about two minutes of the last fight a gun was brought into the scene, handed from one youth to another, and shots were fired into a crowd he estimated at 3,000 to 6,000 people.

Eleven people were shot, and all of them appear to have been unintended targets, the chief said. No one died. The hospital picture is still serious and the counts differ by source: Revell said six people remain hospitalized, one of them at Shands UF and three in critical condition, while a Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare administrator said earlier that day that four patients remain at that hospital, one in critical condition and three in fair condition. Revell told the congregation that 24 officers were within 200 yards when the shooting started, that officers picked up victims and carried them to ATVs so they could reach ambulances, and that one officer held a victim who had been shot in the head until transport was possible.

The chief also disclosed two operational facts that had not been aired before. In the days before homecoming, he said, law enforcement identified about 40 of the city's most violent people with outstanding warrants and picked up 36 of them to try to make the weekend safer. And he confirmed, without giving a reason, that the surveillance camera on the pole directly above where the shooting happened did not work - a gap State Attorney Jack Campbell had criticized.

The case against the accused teenager moved without a hearing this week. Anthony Rivers III, 15, was arrested the day after the shooting on 11 counts of attempted homicide and a charge of possession of a firearm by a delinquent; he was charged as an adult on October 27 and booked into the Leon County Detention Facility. A pretrial detention hearing set for Friday, where more details were expected to come out, was abruptly canceled after the state attorney and Rivers' defense attorney agreed he will remain in jail. Revell declined to discuss specifics of the case, saying only, as the Democrat reported his words: 'We don't arrest someone without probable cause.' The investigation remains active.