Five people and an unborn child were found dead on Sunday in Indianapolis, in what the city’s mayor called an act of mass murder.
Although the names and ages of the victims were not released and the reason is not immediately known, Mayor Joe Hogsett said the shooting brought “terror to our community”.
“This morning, the city of Indianapolis was the target of an act of depravity that has become very common across the country and will never fail to shock conscience,” he told reporters.
Hogsett added that the evidence collected so far suggests that the killings are not linked to the “deadly confluence of weapons, drug abuse and poverty” in Indianapolis, which he said officials have been working to resolve for years.
Police found the first victim, a young male, at about 4 am local time, with gunshot wounds in an area northeast of downtown Indianapolis, a police spokesman told reporters. Police later found the bodies of five people in a house less than 800 meters away.
A pregnant woman was taken to a local hospital, where she and her unborn child were pronounced dead, the spokesman said. The young man was expected to survive.
It was not immediately clear how the victims were connected, although the head of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, Randal Taylor, told reporters that the incident did not appear to be random.
No suspects have been identified, he said, and there was possibly more than one sniper.