Bullets from gun battle narrowly miss softball game in Feltonville

A hail of bullets from a gun battle in a Feltonville alleyway Wednesday night narrowly missed a crowded softball field, police said.

At 8:08 p.m., police responded to reports of shots fired at the playground at Feltonville Recreation Center, at B and Loudon streets, Chief Inspector Scott Small said. Officers arrived at the scene and found 13 spent shell casings littering an alley behind houses on B Street directly across from a softball game going on outside the rec center.

Not far from the casings, cops also found a gun tossed under a parked car, Small said.

Small said officers initially found no evidence that anyone had been hit -- flying bullets narrowly missed 30 to 40 people on the field, he said -- but a 21-year-old man with a gunshot wound to his leg was dropped off by a private vehicle at Temple University Hospital.

Small said that man was in stable condition and police were investigating the possibility that he may have been one of the shooters. Witness accounts indicated that two to three men had been shooting and fled the scene, police said.

Ballistic evidence, including strike marks on a fence north of where police found the fired casings and a bullet hole in a truck parked just outside the ball field, indicated shots were fired in both directions, Small said. Investigators were working late Wednesday to determine how many guns had been involved in the shooting.

"A parked vehicle was struck feet away from the softball game," Small said. "It's fortunate that no one was hit."

Police said the rec center does not have surveillance cameras, but that they found one on a residence in the area that may have captured the shooters coming or going.

Another shooting happened near the same playground within the last two months, according to police.

The shooting remains under investigation.