Saturday, April 27, 2024

The first gunfire of the year in Cambridge came Thursday, police said in an email Friday. Like many of the city’s gunfire incidents, no victims were found – only shell casings that showed a weapon had been fired.

Police were called to Danehy Park in Neighborhood 9 at around 9:20 p.m. by two callers from the area, with one reporting 10 shots and the other 20, according to scanner reports. Officers searched areas of the 55-acre park until 9:50 p.m. before finding the casings at Field and Fern streets, by a parking lot next to the Universal Design playground named after former city manager Louis A. DePasquale. 

“We are investigating exactly how many shots were fired and how many firearms were involved,” police said in a 7:20 a.m. Friday email.

Along with there being no victims, no witnesses were found, police said.

It was just Dec. 16, 2022, that the neighborhood by the park and Universal Design playground experienced another jarring gunfire incident, this one at at the Briston Arms apartments on Garden Street – around the corner from Thursday’s incident. 

In the 2022 incident, a resident’s window was shot out.

That year saw 13 gunfire incidents, though only two involved gunfire with injuries or deaths. Incidents were down to six in 2023, not including a fatal police shooting that preceded them all, but there was more violence to people: Four of the six gun incidents in 2023 not involving police involved injury or death.

In 2022 and 2023, the city was barely a week into the new year before those incidents – Jan. 7 and Jan. 9, respectively. This year, the first incident took place with less than a week to go until February.