Triple shooting in Lower Northeast leaves 16-year-old dead amid violent start to year

A triple shooting in Lower Northeast Philadelphia on Thursday night left a 16-year-old boy dead and two others hospitalized as the city’s gun violence continues unabated into the new year.

Police said the gunfire erupted shortly after 6 p.m. on the 2000 block of Brill Street, between Frankford and Wissinoming. The 16-year-old male suffered two gunshots to the chest and one to the stomach, police said. He was driven to a firehouse less than two miles from the scene of the shooting, and pronounced dead within the hour at Jefferson Torresdale Hospital.

Another man, 35, was shot multiple times but placed in stable condition at the same hospital, while the third male victim, 42, remained in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the chest, police said.

Police did not make any arrests or name any suspects in the case, and no information was available on the number of shooters Thursday night.

Half an hour after the triple shooting, a man was fatally gunned down in Harrowgate, along the 3500 block of Kensington Avenue, according to police. No arrests have been and no weapon was recovered.

Thursday’s triple shooting comes just days after another triple shooting in a Chinese restaurant in Southwest Philadelphia, where two gunmen left two people dead and another fighting for their life. Police have made no arrests in that case.

Philadelphia finished 2022 with more than 500 homicides for the second year in a row, shattering a record of violence that the city has not seen in decades.

While shootings have continued at a gallop into 2023 — including nearly a dozen shootings on New Year’s Day, the shooting of a 7-year-old child in Kensington, and the killing of a gas station worker in Tacony — the city has recorded a dozen fewer homicides than it did at this time last year, according to police data.