KEARNS, Utah, March 9, 2021 (Gephardt Daily) — One person is dead, and two others wounded after shootings at at least two crime scenes in Kearns Tuesday afternoon.
Unified Police Department Detective Ken Hansen said the deadly chain of events began about 4 p.m. when someone in a red Saturn automobile opened fire on a blue BMW in the parking lot of a church ward house at 5305 West 5400 South.
The male driver of the BMW was mortally wounded, causing the vehicle to hit a wall on the west side of the parking lot.
Passengers jumped from the BMW and fled north before carjacking a white Dodge Dart or Charger, according to Hansen. The male driver was shot in the carjacking and an additional person was injured, but it was not immediately clear which car that victim was from, Hansen said.
Police across the Salt Lake Valley are on the lookout for both the red Saturn and the white Dodge Dart or Charger. Hansen said the Saturn could be carrying as many as four people. It was unclear how many people may be in the carjacked Dodge.
Hansen stressed police have many unanswered questions as the investigation took a strange twist right from the start.
“The call came in as a traffic accident,” Hansen said. Police then realized it was a violent crime scene. “It’s not very often that you have possible victims of a shooting leave that scene, carjacking another vehicle and shooting another person.”
Hansen said it’s unknown whether the occupants of all three cars knew each other.
“This is really a tragic situation when it occurs in a neighborhood like this,” Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera said. “People are coming and going to work, and they just want a safe neighborhood, and then to have something like this happens — we take really serious and we want to find out what happened, and apprehend who’s ever involved.”
