A Bradenton man was shot but police don’t know where the incident occurred. Do you?
Police are trying to determine who shot a 19-year-old Bradenton man and why, but first they need to find where the incident occurred.
At about 9:20 a.m. Wednesday, Bradenton Police were called to the Bradenton Village apartment complex in the 200 block of 15th Avenue Circle West. When they arrived, it was discovered that the teen had not been shot inside an apartment.
Police interviewed everyone at the scene and canvassed the neighborhood, but no one claimed to have witnessed the shooting.
Greg Sallie said the victim walked up to him outside the apartment building, he told the Bradenton Herald after speaking to police.
“He just walked up to me and said he was shot,” said Sallie, a friend of the victim.
Sallie helped the victim up the stairs and called 911. As he waited for paramedics, he said, he held a fresh towel tightly on the wound.
“He couldn’t talk. He was in too much pain,” Sallie added.
The victim wasn’t doing much talking after arriving at Blake Medical Center, either, according to detectives, and was uncooperative with the nurses tending to him. The victim signed a waiver of prosecution, refusing to cooperate with the investigation.
The victim, who was shot in the left side of his chest, was in stable condition after arriving at Blake, according to police spokesman captain Brian Thiers. The victim’s injuries did not appear to be life-threatening, Thiers said.
“We’re working backwards right now. We are starting from where he stopped, trying to go backwards,” Thiers said.
Detectives canvassed the neighborhood searching for bullet casings or evidence that would lead them to where the victim was shot.
Two blocks west of the apartment building, where the victim ran to barefoot, detectives and crime scene technicians found a pair of slide sandals and what appeared to be footsteps left behind after the victim ran out of the shoes.
Without cooperation from the victim, police fear retaliation and are looking to the community to come forward with information to help them determine what happened and who is responsible.
“We’re looking for any type of information right now. Anybody that saw anything, vehicles, people running or whatever, let us know,” Thiers said.
This story was originally published September 11, 2019 at 9:53 AM.
