Long Beach shootings down by 23% compared to last year.
Three shootings occurred in Long Beach over the weekend, bringing the reported total number of 2024 shootings in the city to 37.
At this point in 2023, there had been 53 reported shootings in Long Beach. At least three people have been shot to death in Long Beach in 2024, according to the Long Beach Police Department’s online police blotter, which records incidents that occur outside of the department’s usual office hours.
The first of the shootings over the weekend occurred on the evening of Feb. 17, when two separate groups of unidentified males got into a dispute on Second Street, which police allege escalated when 24-year-old Christopher Rene Salguero took out a firearm and shot 32-year-old Long Beach resident Johnny Santos.
Police and paramedics responded to the scene, but by then the suspects had fled the area. Paramedics rushed Santos to a local hospital with a life-threatening gunshot wound to the upper body, where he later died due to his injury.
Salguero was arrested in San Pedro on Monday, police said in a public statement.
Later that same day, another argument led to a shooting in the 1500 block of Seabright Avenue. Police said two men were arguing, then got into a physical fight, during which one man took out a firearm and shot the other before fleeing the scene.
The victim suffered a non-life-threatening gunshot wound to the upper body. Paramedics took the victim to a local hospital for treatment.
The following day, on the evening of Feb. 18, another shooting occurred after what police described as “a brief verbal exchange” between two men, near the intersection of 20th Street and Pine Avenue. The suspect fired his gun in the air, and no injuries were reported. The suspect fled the scene before police arrived.
According to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, there have been a recorded 2,161 shootings in the United States since the start of 2024.
In 2023, the Long Beach Police Department’s online blotter recorded 189 shootings. In 108 of these incidents someone was shot, and 17 of them died.
[A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the total numbers of shootings in 2023 and 2024 based on the LBPD’s online blotter, which only records crimes that occur outside of the department’s office hours. It also incorrectly stated that shootings had increased by 34%. The Signal Tribune regrets these errors.
The article has also been updated to identify a previously unknown suspect in a deadly shooting.]
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