A teenager was fighting for his life and a man was hospitalized early Sunday morning after minutes-apart shootings in West Philadelphia's Overbrook neighborhood.
Police on Sunday afternoon said they believe the back-to-back shootings are connected, but detectives were working to determine what motivated them.
In the first shooting, police said, someone opened fire on a 15-year-old boy near 67th and Leeds streets just before 11 p.m. Saturday, wounding him in the right side of the neck, the lower back and the upper leg. The boy remained hospitalized at Presbyterian Medical Center in critical but stable condition Sunday afternoon.
While police were investigating that shooting about a half-hour later, shots rang out around the corner on Lebanon Avenue near 67th Street. Minutes later, police said, a woman and a 24-year-old man who was bleeding walked onto Leeds Street, yelling to the officers there for help.
Police said the victim in the second shooting, who was wounded in his right bicep and right torso, told officers that he and a friend were outside on Lebanon Avenue when a silver crossover vehicle stopped near them so the driver could yell to them. When the victim told the driver he had the wrong person, the car took off, but the driver later returned and then shot him, police said.
That victim was hospitalized at Presbyterian Medical Center in stable condition.
The shootings came the same night that a teenage boy was gunned down elsewhere in West Philadelphia, in Belmont. Police said in that case, they're close to making an arrest.
