MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. – Miami Gardens residents said they were afraid after two shootings on Monday injured four people.
John Naranjo said he woke up shortly before 2:30 a.m. to the terrifying sound of rapid fire. He said it was so loud that he thought his house was the target.
It wasn’t. The shooting was across the street from Naranjo’s house near the intersection of Northwest 198 Street and Sixth Place. Two women and a man were injured, police said.
“If there was that much gunfire, they were absolutely trying to terminate somebody’s life,” Naranjo said.
Four shooters arrived in a sports utility vehicle and fled, police said. At least half a dozen of their bullets went through a sports utility vehicle.
“I looked out the window, back over there, there was commotion — people with flashlights, looking around,” Naranjo said. “Within three minutes, the cops were here.”
Detectives were already investigating another shooting that injured a man in a car shortly before 1 a.m., near the intersection of Northwest 210 Street and 38 Avenue. It was a drive-by shooting.
Rev. Lorezo Johnson, the founder of the Community Youth Against Violence, a nonprofit organization affiliated with a church and based in Miami-Dade County’s Gladeview neighborhood, said he is familiar with how gun violence affects communities.
Johnson had participated in a roundtable about gun violence prevention — which he said includes a stronger police presence, surveillance cameras, and curfews. The sequence of shootings in Miami Gardens concerned him.
“It’s like an epidemic, now, every day you wake up, it’s something,” Johnson said. “You see it all of the time ... people are dying; kids are dying.”
The condition of the three who were injured near Naranjo’s house was stable, according to Miami-Dade Fire Rescue.
The man who was injured earlier in a car had to be airlifted to Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center.
Detectives were asking anyone with information about this or other cases to call Miami-Dade County Crime Stoppers at 305-471-8477.