PHILADELPHIA (AP) – When two teenage friends in matching sweatshirts heard gunfire in front of a crowd on South Street in Philadelphia on Saturday night, each pulled out his own weapon and began firing at random, officials said Thursday.
One hit and killed a youth counselor celebrating his 22nd birthday on an unusually warm night, while the other killed a 27-year-old home health aide, authorities said. The teenagers also hit at least one of the 11 people injured in the melee, which began at least a block away when a brawl turned into a gunfight that killed a third person, one of them gunmen involved in this fight, authorities said.
“Unfortunately, there’s nothing new about (when) people hear gunfire, get the guns they have,” District Attorney Larry Krasner said Thursday, when the pair of 18-year-old murder suspects were caught in Virginia by American Marshals.
“We have what started as an unfair fight: two people attacking one person. In a country where there are about 300 million people and 500 million weapons, it went from fists to bullets very, very quickly,” he said. Krasner.
Quadir Dukes-Hill, 18, and Nahjee Whittington, who was 17 at the time of the shooting but now 18, both face charges of murder, authorities said. Dukes-Hill is charged with the death of 27-year-old Alexis Quinn, while Whittington is charged with the death of Kristopher Minners, 22. Both suspects are from the Philadelphia area, but were captured Thursday morning in last minute in a house in Richmond without incident, according to Robert Clark, a supervisor of the fugitive working group of the US Marshals Service.
The teens will be extradited to face charges in Philadelphia in the coming weeks and will not be eligible for bail given the murder charges, Krasner and other officials said at a news conference on Thursday afternoon. Krasner hopes to try Whittington as an adult, even though he was 18 days old at the time. It was not immediately clear if they had lawyers representing them.
The shooting began one or two blocks later on South Street, a gathering place for young crowds for half a century, full of restaurants, bars and shops, when three men began fighting and two exchanged gunfire, firing a total of 17 bullets.
Police believe Gary Jackson, 34, pulled out his gun first and hit a man who shot and killed him. That man remains hospitalized in critical condition. Krasner does not intend to charge him, considering the fatal self-defense of the shootings. Both Jackson and the hospitalized man were licensed to carry firearms, the prosecutor said.
However, his office charged a fifth man who said he fired an illegally made ghost gun at the crowd. They are still unsure whether the gunman hit any of the 11 wounded.
Saturday’s scene surveillance video showed dozens of people rolling down the sidewalks and down the street, before fleeing when the shot exploded. Minners was a residential counselor at Girard College, a boarding school for disadvantaged youth that he had attended, while Quinn was a health aide.
“Guns look like they’re falling from the sky,” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said Tuesday as she walked around the area with Mayor Jim Kenney and spoke with concerned traders, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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AP staff writer Bruce Shipkowski contributed to this Trenton report. Follow Maryclaire Dale on Twitter at