That's 1:00 AM on a Friday last
week. This is Penny Alsabe's Denver home.
That's Penny.
That's her son. And something's
wrong. It's the moment,
the moment gun violence literaly
came to her front door.
I really thought that.
You know, someone ran the stop
sign and one car hit another,
and that's kind of what the situation was.
I never thought there would be a
shooting in in front of my hous.
To understand gun violence in America,
we looked at a single week from last year,
seven days with more than
1000 shootings in the US,
21 in Colorado, 15 people wound,
six dead No2. Exactly.
Alike in Colorado Springs,
someone gunned down a young fat.
In Greeley,
a man pulled the trigger and
speed off in a stolen car. Bare.
In a train and eluding police,
Denver police are now investigag
after a drive by shooting
in Denver. Two men shot into a crowded
nightclub and an off duty cop shot back.
Somehow nobody got hurt.
The bullet hit. Right about hern
a rolling gunfight echoed throuh
the Central Park neighborhood.
At least 24 shots fired before a stolen
Toyota spun out and a teenage gl
collapsed with four bullet woun.
It freaked me out a bit.
A year later, Teddy Gordon still
has a reminder of the day He sad
get out of here, I'll shoot you.
And William once hasn't forgottn
the thief who stole his faded C.
I just backed away and let him have the car.
Better than being dead.
So how typical was that seven day span?
Pretty typical.
On average last year,
Colorado had about 15 shootings a week,
resulting in a dozen injuries
and seven deaths.
It's awful every time Doctor Emy
Bett sees gun violence up close.
Every day I'm in the ER, I see
someone at risk of firearm deat.
I grew up here in Colorado,
born and raised in northeast De.
Jonathan McMillan has seen it t.
In the early 1990s, he lost
friends in a wave of shootings.
I was a part of that scene and
made some really poor decisions,
which late led me to.
Being incarcerated.
And at the age of 25
now, McMillan and Betts both had
gun violence prevention project.
McMillan at the state health department.
Betts at the University of
Colorado Medical School.
I wish I had a magic wand that ,
you know, I could just wave andy
this is what we need to focus o,
But unfortunately, it's just wa,
way more complex than that.
It'll mean everything
from safely storing guns,
gun locks and trigger locks and.
And gun safes.
To keeping kids in school
and off the streets.
And we need to be working on
youth development programs.
And from offering more mental health help,
raising awareness around the resources
to addressing poverty. What
are the things driving poverty was like?
We need to be doing all of it.
I want to believe that we
can get to a better place.
My son had probably about six friends over.
They were sitting out by
the fire pit, hanging out.
They came out the gate and ran down, ran
down to help.
The man's name was Scott Ligaki,
a stranger to Penny.
You know, I remember performing.
At one point, his eyes kind
of rolled back in his head.
But he's going into shock.
Whatever's going on and the doc,
the ambulance, everyone, they're just, you know, he's
going to be OK.
He wasn't OK 20 minutes
later to hospital, he died.
And then we, a year later,
it's a struggle to walk to the .
It was over here.
Scott Ligakis murder that they found.
The one bullet
Lagachie's death is one of four that we
can Colorado still unsolved. In fact,
of the 21 shootings over those seven days,
only 1/3 of the cases have led to arrests.
And we're still evolving with this almost
a year later. It's just
gotten out of control.
It's just out of control.
One thing that jumped out us out at us
was how little information is actually
made public in many of these shootings.
In the murder of Scott Lagaki, for example.
We still don't know what
investigators think happened th,
whether they have any suspects.
Again, you said a third of
the cases lead to arrest,
so that means that this week,
in that week. So then the people
who are out there committing gun
crimes have the ability to conte
to commit gun crimes if the
majority aren't getting picked ,
if that week is representative
of others. It seems to fit in wh
the pattern we saw all year lon.
When you look at the sheer
volume of that though, we know
the issues that people have had,
I mean departments have had hiring officers.
It's really not that surprising.
Yeah, I mean there's there's obviously
a lot of factors at play here.
I think both of our experts made
the point that this is very comx
problem and we saw that in the,
in the in the incidents that that that
no two of them were exactly ali.
It wasn't like, oh,
half of them were this kind of incident.
We just need to address that ane
can make a big impact on this problem.
It's
very interesting, Kevin. Thank .