'A lot of things going on in Houston | 3 shootings within 4 hours leave 7 total victims

Data shows shootings in Houston are trending down despite ongoing issues like the rash of overnight incidents.

HOUSTON, Texas — Three shootings within four hours late Monday night into Tuesday morning left seven total victims around Houston.

Scenes included:

• A convenience store along Greens Parkway where three people and several vehicles were shot when police said gunfire was exchanged.
• A pair of victims were then found off the Southwest Freeway. They’d been shot by a single bullet by robbery suspects while inside a car.
• A third scene outside of a club off Cavalcade is where a man and woman were shot.

“It appears that everybody’s going to make it,” HPD Lt. R. Willkens, who responded to all three scenes, said.  “So, hopefully, no one dies.”

A bullet riddled car still sits outside a Houston convenience store where HPD says three victims were shot overnight. Seven total were shot in three separate incidents spanning just four hours across the city. I’ll have more, including important context, later on @KHOU #khou11 pic.twitter.com/t15acu4Ek4

— Jason Miles (@JMilesKHOU) November 21, 2023

“It’s terrible,” said Sandra Cobbin who lives near one of the shooting scenes and has a personal connection to gun violence herself.

“My sister actually got shot and robbed,” Cobbin said.

Like many people, she thinks things are out of control.

But shootings are trending down according to our analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive. That’s a nonprofit that tracks activity across the country.

Seven hundred fifty-six shootings so far this year in Houston resulted in 321 deaths and 540 injuries. That’s down from 940 shootings — year-to-date — in 2022 while the number of shootings spiked the year before that, in 2021, with 1,153 shootings. The lowest number in recent years was 589 in 2019.

That’s still far too unacceptable to many, like Cobbin.

“There’s a lot of things going on in Houston you’ve got to avoid,” she said.

Something else of note, according to data, is that November is not normally a high-shooting month in Houston. Most shootings tend to occur in May, June, and July.

Police are still looking for suspects in all three of those overnight shootings.

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