PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. — South Mississippi police say a shooting after a Mardi Gras parade in Pass Christian has left two people dead and four others wounded.
Police Chief Tim Hendricks confirmed the number of dead and wounded to WLOX-TV.
“It’s chaos,” he told The Sun Herald. “We are roping off the area and collecting evidence and trying to deal with traffic.”
Pass Christian is a city of about 5,300 on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, about 45 miles east-northeast of New Orleans. About 50,000 people had attended the St. Paul Carnival Association’s parade, which broke up before the shooting erupted north of its route, Hendricks said.
Celeste Plaisance told the newspaper, “I think I heard 12 shots fired. We thought it was fireworks at first.” She added that when she saw someone had been shot and people were running away, she ran into her mother’s house.
The bodies, covered in yellow sheets, were near her mother’s steps. Police drove through the yard to avoid disturbing police crime scene tape set up to keep bystanders away, she said.
The shootings occurred a day after parade accidents in south Louisiana injured a man and a woman.
Police in Lafayette, Louisiana, told local media that a man fell from the top level of a float during a Mardi Gras parade there.
