Shootings are down, but more are fatal

A little after 8 p.m. Tuesday, gunfire erupted on a Germantown street, and after the shattering noise receded, three men lay wounded, one fatally.

The death of Akir Thomas, 29, of the city's West Oak Lane section, was the 162d homicide in Philadelphia this year.

The triple shooting, on the 5100 block of Henley Street, mirrored other killings in the city, and with the city on a pace to surpass last year's 406 homicides, officials have taken notice of a quirk in the crime figures:

While shootings overall are down, the proportion of homicides caused by gunfire is up.

Through May 18, guns caused 87 percent - 133 - of the 153 homicides. For the same period last year, the figure was 84 percent. In all of 2006, guns caused 85 percent of the homicides.

By contrast, about two-thirds of homicides nationwide are committed with firearms, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The 648 shootings in Philadelphia as of May 18 were down 3 percent from last year, while homicides overall were up 8 percent.

"It's alarming," Deputy Police Commissioner Richard Ross Jr., who is in charge of gun-control strategies, said of the 87 percent rate of homicides by firearms.

There is no easy explanation, but police have pointed to a number of possible factors, including a proliferation of semiautomatic weapons, often capable of firing .357-Magnum, .40-caliber and .45-caliber rounds.

"Bigger bullets cause more damage," Capt. Michael Costello, commander of the homicide unit, said in an interview.

Semiautomatic handguns differ dramatically from revolvers in the number of rounds they can hold. The standard revolver can hold five or six rounds. But a Glock 9mm, for example, can have a magazine with 17, 19, 31 or 33 rounds.

As visits to crime scenes around the city underscore, seldom is one shot fired when semiautomatics are involved, and it is not unusual to find a dozen or more circles marking where shell casings fell on the ground.

The more rounds fired, the greater the chance of hitting a target - or a bystander.

In Thomas' case, he was hit three times in the body while the other men survived, one with a wound to the arm, the other with a leg wound.

Detectives said they believed drugs had been involved, and on Thursday they charged one of the wounded men - Ricardo Mills, 21, of the 5100 block of Keyser Street - with murder.

"It's purely speculative, but we are seeing more cases of multiple shots being fired at victims," Ross said.

While the possible causes for the upswing in gunfire homicides remain anecdotal - police said they did not keep statistics on the calibers and type of handguns used in crimes - an analysis of the crime numbers this year shows that much remains the same about murder in Philadelphia.

The victims mostly are black men ages 18 to 40. All 39 black men in the 18-to-25 age group were killed by gunfire, while firearms were used in the slayings of 36 of the 37 in the second age group.

The motives more often than not are drugs, robbery and disputes, sometimes over simple slights, according to police.

The youngest homicide victim was 1 (weapon: hands), and the oldest was 84, shot by her son in an apparent murder-suicide.

A map shows homicides are concentrated in the poorer neighborhoods in an arc skirting the Northwest, the Northeast, and Center City and its surrounding neighborhoods.

The city's homicide rate has drawn national attention, particularly when it was noted earlier this year that Philadelphia had more homicides than New York, which is six times its size.

That has changed.

According to the New York Police Department, the cities had drawn even at 148 as of May 13. But New York's figure was still 20 percent below last year's.

Both totals, of course, are rising.

Philadelphia's is now 163, police said yesterday. The latest casualty was 16-year-old Rhamik Thomas of South Philadelphia, who collapsed Friday afternoon in the 2300 block of Watkins Street in South Philadelphia after more than 20 shots were fired at him, police said. He was pronounced dead at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania at 4:42 p.m.

Police had made no arrests.