A predawn parking garage in suburban Maryland turned into a crime scene early Monday after gunfire broke out at an illegal car meet-up, killing one young man and leaving a trail of injured victims scattered across multiple hospitals in two states. What started as an underground car rally involving as many as 50 people spiraled into one of the more chaotic crime scenes Howard County has dealt with in recent memory, and law enforcement is now piecing together exactly what went wrong and why nobody saw it coming.
Howard County Police responded just before 5:30 a.m. to a parking structure on Alexander Bell Drive in Columbia after reports of a shooting. What they found was grim. A 24-year-old man from Falls Church, Virginia, Leo Noel Balladares-Arita, was dead at the scene. A woman nearby had been shot and was transported to a hospital. Over the course of the next several hours, four more gunshot victims walked into local hospitals on their own, and a seventh turned up at a Virginia hospital. Seven victims total, one fatal, and not a single gun recovered at the scene.
The investigation immediately became complicated. Detectives were not dealing with a tidy, contained crime scene. Victims and witnesses were spread across multiple hospitals in two states, requiring officers and detectives to fan out in every direction simultaneously. “It’s been somewhat chaotic,” Howard County Police spokesperson Sherry Llewellyn acknowledged, and that word “chaotic” feels like a fair understatement when you factor in the geography of the situation…