5 shot dead, 3 wounded at backyard party in Pa.

Five people were killed and three injured in an ambush-style shooting at a backyard party late Wednesday in Wilkinsburg, east of Pittsburgh, police said.

Lt. Andrew Schurman of the Allegheny County homicide unit said four people were found dead at the scene and the fifth died at a local hospital. Two men were in critical condition and a woman was stable, according to police.

Police offered no motive for the shooting but said they were looking for two gunmen who barged into the backyard party or cookout and opened fire.

“I heard about 30 gunshots, it was just a constant,” Jackie Johnson-Pendleton, a neighbor, tells KDKA. “When I came out, people were screaming and running and bodies were lying on the front porch. People’s lives taken like that at the drop of a hat, it’s just insane and it needs to stop.”

Schurman said said gunshots were fired from two locations but police don’t believe anyone at the party fired back.

"Partygoers appeared to try to run into the residence at which point a person on the side or backyard adjacent to the residence fired at the back porch," police said in a statement. "All four of the individuals who died at the scene died on that back porch."

As ambulances and police cars converged on the scene, neighborfs gathered on the street, some of them sobbing and saying they lost family members, the Associated Press reported.

Five people were killed and three others injured when gunfire broke out at a backyard party in Wilkinsburg, east of Pittsburgh. USA TODAY

Kayla Alexander, a local resident, told WPXI-TV she was walking home when she heard two dozen shots and then saw people running from the area. She said authorities were keeping her from getting to her home on Franklin Avenue, a usually quiet street lined by two-story brick houses built in the early 1900s..

James Boyd, 70, has lived in a home three doors away from the shooting for 24 years. He told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the gunfire “went on for almost a minute.”

“I thought it was maybe the pipes bursting. But then we realized it was gunshots. We’ve had trouble in this neighborhood before but never this close to home,” Boyd said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Wilkinsburg, in Allegheny County, has a population of 15,800.

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