Two men, both 20 years old, apparently got into a beef at a neighborhood street festival in Toledo, Ohio, and resolved it by firing guns into a crowd of hundreds of people. Twelve of those people got hit. Neither shooter was among them. Both are now in custody, which is the one part of this story that doesn't make you want to stare at a wall.
The Second Arrest
Ka Nye Taylor, 20, was arrested Wednesday in Columbus, according to the Toledo Police Department. The New York Post reports that members of the U.S. Marshals Service, the Ohio State Highway Patrol, and the Franklin County Sheriff's Office all assisted in tracking him down. He will be transported to Toledo to face 11 counts of felonious assault.
The first suspect, Eljay Crisp-Carr, also 20, was arrested on June 11, five days after the shooting. He faces the same 11 counts of felonious assault. Court documents for both men list no attorney. Nobody from either man's family or immediate circle responded to requests for comment.
What Actually Happened at the Festival
The Old West End Festival is an annual event held in one of Toledo's historic districts, a neighborhood of Victorian homes with tents, food trucks, and live music. Hundreds of people were there on June 6 when, according to the New York Post, a fight broke out between rival groups and escalated into a full gunfight.
Here is the part that is almost too stupid to process: the two men who were shooting at each other were not among the twelve people who got wounded. The people who got shot were bystanders. Teenagers. A person in their sixties. People who went to a neighborhood festival to eat food and listen to music and were not, in fact, involved in whatever dispute required a public shootout to settle.
The shooting sent people running in every direction. Others stayed to help the wounded alongside paramedics and police. Organizers canceled the second day of the festival.
What the Video Shows
The criminal complaint against Taylor includes a description of video footage showing him firing a gun into the crowd during the altercation. According to the New York Post, the officer reviewing that footage says Taylor is shown shooting toward another man who is also firing. Toledo police used that video, along with data from the NORIS system and an interview with Taylor at the scene, to identify him. An eyewitness also put him there.
The complaint against Crisp-Carr describes a separate video showing him firing, in the words of the detective, indiscriminately into the crowd. Not at a specific person. Not in a specific direction. Indiscriminately. Into a crowd. Police identified Crisp-Carr through witness statements, social media, and law enforcement photographs.
Toledo Is Not an Abstraction
Toledo sits on the western edge of Lake Erie, about 55 miles southwest of Detroit. The Old West End is a real neighborhood with real architecture and real people who show up every year for this event because it is their community and they enjoy it. Or they used to enjoy it without worrying about catching a stray bullet from two men settling a score that had nothing to do with them.
The New York Post notes that the victims ranged from teenagers to a person in their sixties. That is not a statistic. That is a cross-section of a neighborhood showing up to participate in something normal and getting shot because two people decided a public park full of families was an appropriate place to have a gunfight.
Where This Stands Now
Both suspects face 11 counts of felonious assault each. Taylor is being transported back to Toledo. Crisp-Carr has been in custody since June 11. Neither has an attorney listed in court documents.
Eleven counts each, not twelve, which suggests the charging math accounts for the exchange of gunfire between the two of them. The actual count of wounded people is twelve. The festival that got destroyed was in its second day when the shooting happened. None of that gets restored by the arrests, however satisfying it is that law enforcement moved as quickly as it apparently did.
The Dingo Take
Let's just sit with the central fact for a second. Two men fired guns at each other in the middle of a packed public festival. They missed each other completely. They hit twelve other people instead. And both of them were apparently present and identifiable enough that police interviewed one of them at the scene the same day and had the other in custody within eleven days. There is video. There are witnesses. There is, apparently, footage of a man firing a gun into a crowd that was captured and reviewed and used to charge him. None of this was subtle.
The conversation this country has about gun violence almost always ends up in one of two places: either a deranged ideological manifesto or a deeply personal tragedy that gets weaponized by one side and ignored by the other. This story is neither. This is two young men with guns and bad judgment at a street fair, and twelve people who had nothing to do with it getting shot. That is the everyday version of this problem. It does not trend as hard. It does not generate the same breathless cable coverage. It is, however, the version that keeps happening.
Two arrests in eleven days is a fast turnaround, and credit where it is due to Toledo PD and the agencies that helped. But the twelve people who got wounded at a Victorian-neighborhood street festival on a Saturday in June did not need arrests. They needed to not get shot. That part, as usual, nobody figured out in advance.
