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Police probing Oxford Circle shooting that left a woman dead and a 17-year-old wounded

The 17-year-old victim was hospitalized Tuesday morning in critical condition, but had been stabilized, police said.

Philadelphia police are investigating a double shooting that left a 35-year-old woman dead and her teenage son critically wounded. The victims were among 15 people shot across the city Monday.
Philadelphia police are investigating a double shooting that left a 35-year-old woman dead and her teenage son critically wounded. The victims were among 15 people shot across the city Monday.Read moreYong Kim / Staff Photographer

Philadelphia police are investigating a shooting late Monday in the city’s Oxford Circle section that killed a 35-year-old woman and left a 17-year-old critically wounded.

Officers responded to a home on the 900 block of Magee Avenue just after 10:30 p.m. and found the female victim, later identified as Tasena Jennings, in the kitchen with gunshot wounds to her head and chest, police said.

Authorities on Tuesday said the teen was stabilized at Albert Einstein Medical Center after being shot in the stomach. Investigators had not yet determined a motive or recovered the weapon.

Authorities told reporters on scene Monday night that preliminary information suggested Jennings was the teenage victim’s mother, and that another man was being held for questioning after being caught trying to escape the house by climbing out a window. But police officials Tuesday would not confirm a suspect was in custody and said no one had been arrested.

The victims were among 15 people shot across the city in 11 separate incidents on Monday, according to police. The woman was the fifth person killed in Philadelphia in 2022. All died of gunshots — they include three men and a 16-year-old boy fatally shot during a new year celebration early Saturday.

The last few days follow an especially violent 2021, when the city saw 562 homicides, according to police statistics — the most in its modern history. Of those victims, 70 were women, by far the most in any year since at least 2007.

Many of those killings were the result of shootings, which surged in Philadelphia and in many other cities in 2020 and continued through much of last year. More than 2,300 people were shot last year, also a record.

» READ MORE: Philly’s homicide crisis in 2021 featured more guns, more retaliatory shootings, more female victims

Among the victims Monday was a 38-year-old man shot four times while he was inside a corner store around 4 p.m. on the 2200 block of North Broad Street, police said. Officers drove him to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead minutes later. No one was arrested.

He was one of five people shot in North Philadelphia’s 22nd police district over five hours. Just before 8 p.m., officers responded to the 2000 block of North 23rd Street, where they found a 34-year-old man shot once in the right side and a 33-year-old man shot once in the neck. Both were hospitalized in stable condition at Temple.

Less than an hour later and a mile away on the 2500 block of North 17th Street, police found two gunshot victims — a 59-year-old man and a 43-year-old woman — in the street. Both the man, who was shot in the stomach and the back, and the woman, struck six times in the arm, leg, and back, were hospitalized in stable condition.

No one was arrested in connection with either of the double shootings, police said.