CINCINNATI — One woman is dead and two others were injured in a shooting near Grant Park in Over-the-Rhine early Saturday.
Police arrived at 64 East McMicken Ave. just before 5:30 a.m. Saturday and found 35-year-old Brandi Turner dead from a gunshot wound.
Two other victims, whom police have not identified, were taken to University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
The shooting comes days after two boys were shot in separate incidents in their homes this week in the Villages at Roll Hill and the West End.
The area in and around Grant Park has been a hotspot for shootings for years. Even as police and neighbors have been working to clean up the area to prevent more violence, shootings persist.
RELATED: As Grant Park shootings continue, neighbors rely on each other — not police — to protect kids
"Now it's time to step up. I need the right people to see this, to help us make the change with this senseless gun violence,” Mitch Morris of the Cincinnati Works Phoenix Program said at a gun violence protest on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive Saturday afternoon.
City data showspolice have responded to more than 250 shootings and 307 people have been victims of a shooting so far this year. As of Monday, Cincinnati Police had responded to 64 homicides so far in 2021.
At the protest, Morris and others laid body bags on the MLK Jr. bridge to show communities what those numbers mean in terms of lives lost.
"Each one of those body bags represents a family, represents a mother or father. I need people to see the reality of this," said Morris.
Sergeant George Jason is the District 1 neighborhood liaison supervisor. He said a heavier police presence near the park has been requested by some people in the community.
"We get a lot of calls from concerned citizens, businesses. They just remind us that they would like to see police out walking,” Jason said. "We're trying to build a relationship with the community."
Gun violence and homicides in Cincinnati reached an all-time high in 2020, and 2021 is on pace to remain the second deadliest year in recent history.
