Five members of one Illinois family were hunted across a city on a Sunday morning, and the alleged killers are barely old enough to drive.
Story Snapshot
- Five related adults were shot dead and two more badly hurt across three East St. Louis locations
- Illinois State Police say a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old are in custody as suspects in the attacks
- Investigators call it a “targeted mass shooting” inside one extended family, not random street violence
- Officials say there is no ongoing threat to the public, but the motive remains a mystery
A family destroyed in three linked crime scenes
Illinois State Police say the story starts with a single family and spreads over three spots in East St. Louis. Three victims were found shot to death at the Samuel Gompers Homes public housing complex. Another victim was killed at a home on 39th Street.
A fifth was found dead at Jones Park. Two more family members were shot at the park and rushed to a St. Louis hospital with serious injuries. Police say all seven victims are related.
Local officials later named the dead, painting a picture of a multi-generational family wiped out in hours. The coroner listed Patricia May, age 74, and Cherie May, age 49, among the victims, along with younger relatives in their twenties.
Reports differ on the exact spelling of some names, which often happens when reporters work off fast-changing early lists, but they agree that five related adults are gone. For this family, those details will matter less than the loss itself.
Two teenagers in custody and an uneasy sense of safety
Police say troopers stopped a vehicle and arrested two teenagers, ages 15 and 16, at Frank Holten State Park the same day. Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly told reporters one of the suspects has a direct family link to at least one victim.
Some television reports go further and say all of the victims were related to the teens, but state police have not publicly confirmed the exact family tree. That gap is small on paper, but huge for a community trying to understand what happened.
5 family members killed, 2 others gravely wounded in 'targeted' mass shooting – with teen relative in custody: cops https://t.co/m6g1SKeKd1 pic.twitter.com/3zYIMyG5yE
— New York Post (@nypost) July 13, 2026
Investigators are working with the St. Clair County State’s Attorney to prepare charges, but none had been filed immediately after the arrests. Kelly stressed there is “no known threat to the public,” because they believe the shootings were targeted at this one family, not random attacks on strangers.
That sounds comforting until you remember five people are dead. It raises a hard question many Americans ask: is it really less serious when violence stays “in the family”?
Why the “mass shooting” label is being argued
State police repeatedly called this a “targeted mass shooting” because there were multiple victims across linked crime scenes tied to the same suspects. Some local voices push back.
One city council member argued this is not a mass shooting “in the conventional sense,” since it was aimed at known relatives rather than a crowd of unknown victims. That kind of word game shows how much labels matter for mayors, tourism boards, and national headlines.
Gun violence researchers have found that more than half of mass shootings in America between 2009 and 2016 involved domestic or family situations. That means what happened in East St. Louis is not a strange outlier.
It fits a broader pattern where family disputes and long-running tension explode into deadly force. When officials shy away from the mass shooting label in those cases, they risk hiding the most common type of mass killing behind softer language.
Unanswered questions about motive and accountability
Illinois State Police say they do not yet know the motive. Kelly told reporters that question is still under investigation. Online, rumors are already flying. Some posts claim everything from gang ties to petty family drama.
None of that is backed by public evidence so far. This is where common sense demands patience: wait for facts from sworn testimony, not guesses from social media.
The ages of the suspects raise another debate. At 15 and 16, they will move through a juvenile system that was built for kids who make dumb choices, not for teenagers accused of wiping out their own family.
Many Americans will look at five dead relatives and ask whether the law still makes sense when minors carry adult firepower. Others will argue that we must keep clear lines around juvenile protections, even in awful cases, to prevent emotional outrage from rewriting due process.
Sources:
abc7chicago.com, bnd.com, youtube.com
