Eight Shot Including Four Children at Coney Island July Fourth Celebration

A Fourth of July crowd on West 31st Street in Brooklyn turned into a crime scene late Saturday night when gunfire erupted during holiday festivities, leaving eight people wounded.

At least eight people were shot on West 31st Street in Coney Island, Brooklyn, on the night of July 4.
Four of the victims were children, according to NYPD reports.
The shooting occurred during Fourth of July celebrations in the beachfront neighborhood.
NYPD is investigating; no suspect information has been publicly confirmed at time of publication.

It was still Fourth of July when the fireworks gave way to something else entirely. Late Saturday night, as crowds packed the blocks near the Coney Island waterfront for holiday celebrations, gunfire broke out on West 31st Street in Brooklyn — and by the time officers arrived, eight people had been shot. Four of them were children.

The NYPD confirmed the shooting in reports filed overnight. Coney Island, a neighborhood that draws enormous holiday crowds to its boardwalk, amusement strip, and beachfront, was in the middle of one of its busiest nights of the year when the incident occurred. The stretch of West 31st Street sits a few blocks inland from the shore, in a residential section of the neighborhood.

Details on the condition of the victims and the circumstances of the shooting remained limited in early reports. No suspect information had been publicly confirmed as of Sunday morning. The investigation is ongoing.

The shooting lands against a broader backdrop of concern over holiday-weekend gun violence in New York City, a pattern city officials have addressed in prior summers with increased NYPD deployment around major public gatherings. Whether those resources were in place on West 31st Street on Saturday night was not immediately clear from available reports.