READING, Pa. — “Like two in the morning, all we heard was what sounded like a lot of gunshots.”
That’s how Jose Torres describes what he heard from inside his apartment near South 17th and Cotton streets early Sunday morning.
“We heard the police from far away and then all of a sudden they had blocked everything off,” Torres said. “I see them take a guy in an ambulance… and then the next day I came and seen all this glass on the floor here.”
Police say three men were shot outside a bar around 2 a.m. Investigators say the shooting was an isolated incident tied to a fight outside the business. All three victims remain hospitalized.
Just down the block, neighbor Adolfo Rios says he found out while working.
“Around 5 o’clock, my wife called me to my job,” Rios said. “My wife told me, ‘Hey honey, you know what?’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘There’s a whole bunch of police over here.’”
Rios has lived in Reading for 40 years and says the violence is becoming harder to ignore.
“When I came over here, everything quiet,” he said. “You could leave the door open. Nobody bothers you.”
Mayor Eddie Moran and State Representative Manny Guzman also posted statements online calling for community collaboration following the shooting.
But by Monday evening, that frustration turned into a silent protest outside Reading City Hall.
Violence prevention advocate Radara McClendon says shootings like this leave trauma behind.
“I’m feeling like the community is feeling; defeated and a little too desensitized to what we’re seeing,” McClendon said. “And I wish that wasn’t the reality, but it is what it is.”
She says more intervention and prevention efforts are needed across the city.
“We need access to mental health treatments,” McClendon said. “We need paid work opportunities for these young people because we know poverty and racism and things like that are the root causes.”