DA Larry Krasner says four people will be charged in a string of West Philly shootings, including one that injured an 8-year-old boy

The three men surrounded a house in West Philadelphia around 2 a.m. — two in the front, one in the back — then pulled out guns and started firing.

Fifteen bullets in all. Neither of the two people inside was hit, but shots shattered windows and entered a back bedroom before the shooters ran away.

Surveillance footage of that 2018 incident was shown on 6ABC as police searched for leads. And according to court documents, Dashawn Packer took notice.

“I’m leaving Philly tomorrow to bro,” he texted a friend, sending a link to the news story along with laughing emojis. “I’m [on the] news, 3 different shooting on camera.”

Prosecutors on Monday detailed that series of events in a grand jury presentment, saying Packer was one of the men who fired into the house because there was a bounty for shooting at it. And at a news conference in West Philadelphia, authorities said the incident was one of seven back-and-forth shootings that Packer and three other men committed in the area in 2018 and 2019 — part of an ongoing feud between neighborhood groups that left nine people wounded, including an 8-year-old boy struck in the mouth by a stray bullet.

The case stemmed from conflicts that might otherwise be considered trivial, prosecutors said: Online insults, Instagram slights, beefs that intensified after being described in music videos created and posted by group members.

And in a city that last year recorded 499 homicides and more than 2,000 shootings, the investigation showed how complex and time-consuming it can be to secure arrests in even a handful of years-old cases.

The parts of West Philadelphia that Packer is accused of terrorizing with his coconspirators — Devin Bryant, Xavier Veney, and Sabir Scott — have long suffered from high rates of gunfire. And an Inquirer analysis of police data and court records published last year found that fewer than 25% of the hundreds of shootings in those areas since 2015 had resulted in arrests and criminal charges for those who pulled the trigger.

District Attorney Larry Krasner called the investigation “a clear example of how the spread of gun violence resembles the spread of a virus,” saying: “Violence breeds violence.”

State Rep. Joanna McClinton, a Democrat who represents portions of West Philadelphia, said the charges marked progress in seeking to break the perception that people can shoot without consequences.

“We cannot talk about the [nearly] 500 homicides in 2020 if we don’t talk about the outstanding cases from 2018, and 2019, 2017,” McClinton said. “Young people who really think they can do whatever they want, break any law and see no accountability. But today we finally got good news.”

Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said investigators in recent years had increasingly focused on monitoring social-media activity among shooting suspects “because we do know that it’s one of the driving factors” in the city’s gun violence.

Assistant District Attorney Jeffrey Palmer said the case detailed Monday “should send a message to victims, not only in Southwest and West Philadelphia ... that we have not forgotten you, that we will investigate these crimes, that we will solve these crimes and we will bring to justice the people who perpetuate violence in your community.”

It was the second large investigation announced in recent years by the Gun Violence Task Force. In the first, city and state prosecutors charged eight people in 2019 with participating in a violence-filled turf war in South Philadelphia. It also was fueled by social media.

A lawyer for Bryant — who prosecutors said was arrested in Louisiana in January before being extradited to Philadelphia — did not respond Monday to a request for comment. It was not clear if the other three men, all of whom had prior arrests, had attorneys.

The men are accused of committing seven shootings between April 2018 and July 2019. Prosecutors said the investigation was built using evidence including surveillance video, social media posts, text messages, YouTube videos, and cellphone records. Ballistics evidence also showed that the same firearms were used in several of the incidents, according to the grand jury presentment.

Prosecutors wrote that men from five groups, all based in West or Southwest Philadelphia, “challenge and provoke their rivals by issuing taunts and insults on the internet and mocking the deaths of rival group members who have been murdered.”

Palmer said the motives for the shootings were “not the conflicts that you may be used to hearing about,” such as feuds over drug territory or money.

The incidents included the wounding of the 8-year-old boy, who was in his house on the 6000 block of Ludlow Street on Nov. 25, 2018 when “a bullet came through the exterior wall and struck him in the mouth,” the presentment said.

Prosecutors said Packer — a member of a group from 61st and Jefferson Streets, sometimes known as the Fixers — was one of the people who fired. They said the shooters had been targeting two other boys, ages 15 and 16, who were struck on the street and who were members of a rival group known as Northside.

The presentment says social media photos, text messages, and videos posted online sometimes showed the men discussing the violence, or flaunting weapons that authorities later found during searches.

City Councilmember Curtis Jones issued a stern warning at the news conference to those who might resort to such activity.

“If you do not stop, we know who you are. The cameras, the Facebook posts, you’re not invisible,” he said. “That fact is, we will come for you. Why? Because you leave us no choice. ... We have to do what we have to do to provide that safety.”