Peterson pledges action after Indy violence

INDIANAPOLIS -- Mayor Bart Peterson met with aides and top criminal justice officials Saturday to find ways to curb a recent spike in violent crime that included overnight shootings that killed five people.\nPeterson went Saturday morning to a downtown gas station that had been the scene of a shootout hours earlier that killed two people and injured two others.\n"This is an extreme emergency and we've got to pull together and do whatever it takes," Peterson said. "We've already flooded the streets with police officers, we had police officers practically next to all these crimes. People are brazen, they are shooting people practically in front of police officers."\nThe mayor also summoned law enforcement officials and area elected officials to a meeting Saturday afternoon to consider steps that might be taken to stem the violence, which included five slayings earlier in the week.\n"We have a dozen or more steps we are discussing right now internally," he said.\nPolice were investigating whether the gas station shootout was connected to another shooting a few blocks away. A police officer investigating gunfire found the body of Maurice White, 26, in a car in an alley behind the Vault tavern, a block from Monument Circle. White had been shot several times.\nMinutes later, police went to the scene of the shootout, where witnesses told police a person had fired into a car, killing Antonio Jones, 23, and Richard Taylor, 18. Two others in the car, a 26-year-old man and a 22-year-old man, also were shot. Like White, all four victims had been at the tavern earlier.\nIn a separate shooting early Saturday, a van pulled up in front of an east side home and shots killed Jack Berry, 16, and left Billy Isaac Jr., 18, hospitalized in critical condition with gunshot would to his head and neck. Police were searching for a suspect in that shooting.\nAnd late Friday, on the near east side, Gregory Bryant, 44, was found dead in his back yard from a gunshot wound to his head. All of the victims were from Indianapolis.\nThe overnight slayings came during a week of Indianapolis violence that also included a murder-suicide, a double slaying, a woman found shot to death and the killing of a cabdriver during a robbery.\nThe recent violence follows the June 1 slayings of seven people in an east side home, the city's worst mass killing in 25 years. Following those slayings, the Indianapolis Police Department took a series of steps to fight violent crime including moving detectives and community resource officers to patrol duty and stepped-up coverage of high-crime areas.