Photo: Austin Police Department
Three people have been arrested after several shootings in the Austin area over the weekend. One has been identified as 17-year-old Christian Mondragon.
A shelter-in-place order was issued Sunday afternoon in Austin but was rescinded late in the day, according to Austin Police, as law enforcement scrambled to figure out where the shooters would strike next.
Austin Police Department dispatchers started getting calls Saturday night from people who said they were shot at, but they seemed like disparate events.
It was Sunday morning when more of those calls came it that Austin Mayor Kirk Watson and Police Chief Lisa Davis say they began suspecting the randomness of the shooting and collaborated with county and state officials, and the shelter-in-place order for a number of Austin areas were put in place.
"That was when we were pulling it all back together," Chief Davis says, "and we got a description of a car and we started wondering about the randomness of this, and is this all related?"
There were even shots fired at fire stations that had their doors closed -- bullet marks on a garage and some damage to a fire department vehicle, but no injuries.
Four people were injured in the random shootings, according to Austin EMS Chief Robert Luckritz.
"Three people received non-life-threatening injuries, and one sustained critical injuries and was treated with whole blood on the scene and then was taken to a hospital trauma center," he says.
The search for another subject led to the town of Manor, east of Ausitn along Highway 290, where police found three more people in one car.
Manor Police Department officers chased the car and when the driver wrecked it, all three dispersed.
Two of them were captured in minutes, while the search for a third person from the car -- the fifth suspect in the case -- continued as of 8:30 pm CT Sunday.