The Night of Horror in Mississippi

What began as a weekend of joy ended in blood and disbelief. We have deliberately refrained from showing images, because the scenes on site exceed the limits of what is bearable. In Mississippi, that deep, flat heart of America where Friday and Saturday nights belong to football and homecoming is more than just a game, two school celebrations turned into crime scenes. Eight people are dead, including a pregnant woman. More than twenty others were injured. In Leland, a town of barely four thousand residents, the streets now lie still - only the flutter of torn police tape reminds of the night when the community lost its breath.

The shots were fired shortly after the homecoming game of Leland High School, somewhere between music, laughter, and the last car horns with which students celebrated their team. Eyewitnesses report that people were simply standing on the main street, talking, dancing, when suddenly chaos erupted. "It was the most horrific thing I have ever seen," said Camish Hopkins, a woman from the town, after speaking with authorities at city hall. She saw people lying on the asphalt covered in blood, saw four bodies side by side, while others tried to take cover. "Leland failed Leland," she said, "but I know we can do better - because this is not Leland."

The toll: six dead, four at the scene, two more died later at the hospital. Around twenty injured were taken to hospitals, some flown by helicopter as far as the capital Jackson. Among the injured are several teenagers. On Saturday morning, investigators from the Washington County Sheriff’s Office were still searching for evidence, while families waited at city hall for answers no one could give. The crime scene lies less than a hundred meters from a monument to soul singer Tyrone Davis - as if coincidence itself wanted to add a bitter irony.

"It was just senseless gun violence," said Democratic Senator Derrick Simmons, who himself comes from the Delta and is in contact with the police. "What we are experiencing is the result of a flood of weapons circulating." He did not sound angry but exhausted - like someone who has said this sentence too many times. No arrests, no suspects, no motive. Only the certainty that a celebration of togetherness had turned into a night of destruction.

While Leland was still struggling for composure, the next bloodbath occurred 220 kilometers to the east. In Heidelberg, a tiny town with barely 640 residents, shots were fired during the homecoming game of the local high school on the school grounds. Two people died. Whether students or visitors, the police initially did not say. Local police chief Cornell White spoke in the morning of an "ongoing operation," a suspect was on the run. Later, the sheriff’s office stated that they were looking for an 18-year-old man for questioning. The investigation is being conducted with the involvement of the state bureau of investigation. The governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, wrote on social media: "Our state is praying for the victims and their families, as well as for the communities of Heidelberg and Leland. Those responsible will be brought to justice." Words that are likely to sound hollow to many residents. Because they have heard them too often - after Jackson, after Biloxi, after Greenville. After every shooting that never makes it onto the national radar because it does not happen in a big city but in a small, forgotten place.

In a third case, in Sharkey County, again in the Delta, Sheriff Herbert Ceaser reported another shooting after a high school game. Two suspects were arrested. Nothing was initially known about injuries, but the phrase "our thoughts and prayers are with the victim’s family" speaks for itself. They have become phrases that belong to the American South like church bells on Sunday.

What happened that night is more than a succession of local tragedies. It is a mirror of the exhaustion of a society that has long turned the deaths of children, friends, and neighbors into routine. In Mississippi, where the right to bear arms has almost religious status, the thought that one’s own teenagers could die in a hail of bullets remains a political taboo. The debates will follow, brief and heated, before they fade again into silence - until the next siren, the next homecoming, the next massacre. On Saturday morning, downtown Leland was empty. Only a handful of reporters stood behind the yellow barrier, as a gust of wind carried the remains of a paper banner across the street that read in faded letters, "Go Tigers." Behind the windows, families could be seen keeping their doors shut, as if trying to keep out the noise of the night. But there is no place where one can forget the sound of gunfire. Not in Mississippi, not anymore in America.