Eight people shot in night of violence - one of the eight is dead

Eight people were shot  between Monday evening and  Tuesday morning, and one of those eight died, Memphis police said. 

An overnight shooting at 7th and Bickford in North Memphis left a 46-year-old man dead, police said on Twitter. 

 Four others were hurt in a drive-by shooting when bullets were fired into a group shortly after 9 p.m. near the Dixie Grill and Deli corner store. 

The store is roughly 200 yards north of Poplar Avenue and the Memphis VA Medical Center.

Three of the injured were adults, and a juvenile was in critical condition at Le Bonheur Children's Hospital, according to a police report.

"I just wish it would stop," said David Biles, 39, who works in the corner store. "One thing we need is to get these guns off the street." 

Biles said he heard loud shots right outside - maybe five shots, but he wasn't sure. "Everybody got to ducking and running."  

He said he went outside a short time later. "I did see a guy running to a car holding his stomach," he said. That car sped off.

Biles believes the shooting was gang-related, but he said he doesn't know what specific gang or gangs were involved or what led to the shooting.

As of Tuesday afternoon, all the victims from the shooting on Decatur were still alive, police spokeswoman Lt. Karen Rudolph wrote in an email.

Police said on Twitter that the suspects in the drive-by shooting may have been inside a black Ford truck and a silver Chevy Malibu. 

Two more people were shot in the 1200 block of College Street in South Memphis at 1 a.m., police said. Both were in non-critical condition. 

And shortly before 9 p.m. Monday evening, a man arrived at a fire station at 6675 Winchester in Hickory Hill with a gunshot wound and was transported to the Regional Medical Center in critical condition, the police department posted on Twitter.

The suspect was in a brown Camry and the victim may have been shot in a nearby apartment complex, police said.

It wasn't immediately clear what led up to the shootings. They're apparently not related, Rudolph wrote in an email. "No arrests have been made; however, it is believed that the suspect/s are possibly known to at least one of the victims who were shot," she wrote.

The bloody night was a reminder of the city's ongoing struggle with gun violence. The number of victims in one night was unusually high, but shootings, many of them nonfatal, are common here. The city saw a record 228 homicides last year. (The city has seen 123 homicides so far this year, lower than last year's pace, according to The Commercial Appeal's Homicide Tracker.) 

More:Memphis' first slaying of 2017 follows 228 in 2016

Reach reporter Daniel Connolly at 529-5296, daniel.connolly@commercialappeal.com, or on Twitter at @danielconnolly.