Adrian Kulesza, Contributing Photographer

Four young adults were injured in a shooting downtown around 2 a.m. on Friday, according to the New Haven Police Department.

As Halloween festivities in local bars winded down, police officers were alerted to “several gunshots” and one shooting victim near the intersection of Chapel Street and Orange Street around 2:03 a.m., according to a Friday NHPD statement. Several other officers on their way to the scene were then alerted to a second gunshot victim just a block away, on Church Street by Center Street. Both were transported to Yale-New Haven Hospital for treatment. Officers identified a third victim at that scene, and a fourth shooting victim arrived at the hospital by private vehicle shortly after, the statement noted.

All four victims are between the ages of 19 and 22. Two of them have already been released from the hospital, while the other two were in critical condition as of Friday. A 19-year-old woman, the second victim, is battling life-threatening injuries, NHPD Chief Karl Jacobson said at a Friday press conference. NHPD communications officer Christian Bruckhart updated on Sunday that her condition is critical but stable.

No information has been shared about the second victim in critical condition, but Jacobson noted at the press conference that his injuries were not life-threatening.

“There was a large crowd due to the bars letting out,” Jacobson said at the press conference. “We did have twelve officers and a supervisor working [Thursday] night because we were expecting a large crowd, but most of the officers are concentrated on Crown and Temple [streets]. This is an area a few blocks away from that.”

Jacobson noted that the shooting looked like “an exchange of gunfire between two parties.” 

NHPD detectives processed ballistic evidence on Friday morning and determined that the incident primarily happened by the intersection of Center Street and Church Street, per the department statement. Jacobson noted that 30 rounds were fired and that officers recovered a firearm on the scene.

Jacobson said that the officers made one on-site arrest. As of Sunday evening, the department secured a warrant for the second shooter suspect. Jacobson did not disclose the identities of the two suspects but said that both had weapons charges in the past. 

At the press conference, Jacobson repeatedly declined to answer whether the department believes one of the four victims was also one of the two shooters. He did say that the female victim struggling for her life “didn’t have a gun.”

“There was some kind of breach or back-and-forth between two groups, it looks like,” Jacobson said. “And then someone pulled out a gun and then somebody returned fire. And unfortunately one of those guns was a high capacity magazine, leading to more people being struck.”

At the press conference, Jacobson noted that he would assign “even more” officers to the downtown area on Friday night. He said that the department plans to follow up on a series of fights in and around bars to which officers responded Thursday night.

“We will be following up on that, to see if people were over-served, if they were 19 and being served in an establishment, yeah we’re going to go after that establishment,” Jacobson said.

The Yale Police Department alerted the Yale community to the incident around 4 a.m. on Friday, hours after the NHPD posted on X, formerly Twitter, about the shooting at 2:49 a.m. The YPD’s initial alert stated that two people had been shot in the area of 132 Temple St. A follow-up alert from YPD at 11 a.m. reported that police had cleared the area of the shooting.

YPD Chief Anthony Campbell wrote to the News that he received a call around 2:44 a.m. about a shooting near Temple and Crown Streets, which listed 132 Temple St. — a luxury apartment complex — as the closest address.

“Given the proximity of the shooting to campus and the unknown direction the suspects were headed, I felt it was prudent to issue a Yale Alert, even though this incident was outside our jurisdiction and under that of the New Haven Police Department,” Campbell wrote to the News.

Campbell received updates on the location of the incident and the number of individuals injured from the NHPD as they continued their investigation.

He noted that Yale Alerts aim to “notify the Yale community of an imminent threat quickly.” This emphasis on timeliness means the alerts tend to be based on preliminary information, like in the shooting case, he added.

The NHPD is located at 1 Union Ave.