Greenwood Mayor Discusses OLG Festival Shooting
GREENWOOD, Ind. — A 16-year-old from Marion County is in custody in Johnson County after a shooting Friday night at the Our Lady of Greenwood Parish Festival.
A 15-year-old was wounded in the foot by a bullet that ricocheted off the pavement of the street near the South Meridian Street church parking lot.
”There was an off-duty Indiana State trooper driving down Smith Valley Road when it happened,” said Greenwood Mayor Mark Myers. “He was in the right place at the right time. The shooter stepped right in front of him and just started shooting, not even realizing, and he was able to turn his red lights on which turns his video on on his car and he captured the entire thing on video and he also helped capture the suspect so nobody else was injured.”
The teen ran to a car in a nearby strip mall parking lot where he was apprehended.
If tried as an adult, he could face a count of felony criminal recklessness.
The shooting happened midway through the festival’s three-day run and necessitated additional security and altered hours for Saturday.
Myers said festival organizers typically apply for a permit and consult with Greenwood Police as to event security precautions.
”We will consult with them on the number of officers they need, what entry points they should have them at, a lot of other technical things go into it,” said Myers. ”When you have these larger events, larger populations generally, that you have the option for trouble to break out.”
Myers said it was not lost on him or his police department that the arrested teen was not from Greenwood.
”I believe the chief said about 67% of our arrests are Marion County residents,” he said, adding that GPD makes special patrols to keep potential trouble from crossing the border between Johnson and Marion counties. ”We’ll have some special nights where we will have a very heavy duty presence on County Line Road and we’ll stop every vehicle for every violation that we see whether its failure to signal a turn or a taillight out for a headlight out, speeding, whatever, and we’re gonna stop those cars, we’re gonna write ‘em the tickets for whatever it is they did and then anything else that comes up. We generally do find quite a few either wanted people or suspended drivers or whatever. They’re gonna go to jail.”
Last week, Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett and Carmel Mayor Sue Finkam issued a joint statement announcing a Regional Mayors’ Public Safety Partnership Summit to include the leaders from the donut communities surrounding Indianapolis.
”We want to make the central Indiana region a safer place for people so that people do feel comfortable coming to the central Indiana region,” said Myers. ”There’s gonna be a lot of information sharing. ‘What are you doing? What’s working? What’s not working? What can we do to enhance things? How can we make better partnerships between departments and prosecutors’ offices?’ We’re gonna work together with that and bring our police chiefs in. Have them tell us their thoughts on what we can do to do better policing and to make it more enforceable.
”I’ve talked to my judges, I’ve talked to my prosecutor, obviously the police department,” said Myers. ”If you do a crime in Greenwood, you will go to jail and you will be prosecuted and we’ll take it to the full extent of the law. We don’t tolerate that down here.”
