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Highland Park parade shooting: Mayor says gun was legally obtained

HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. — The gunman who opened fire at a Fourth of July parade Monday morning in a Chicago suburb legally obtained the weapon used in the shooting, the city’s mayor said.

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“I don’t know where the gun came from, but I do know that it was legally obtained,” Nancy Rotering, the mayor of Highland Park, Illinois, said in an interview with the “Today” show Tuesday morning.

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The city has an assault weapons ban, “Today” reported.

The update came less than 24 hours after a gunman armed with “a high-powered rifle” began shooting from the roof of a building, killing six people and wounding at least two dozen others during Highland Park’s Independence Day parade, police said. Later Monday, police arrested a person of interest, 21-year-old Robert E. “Bobby” Crimo, in connection with the shooting, which police described as “random” but “intentional,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Although Crimo hasn’t officially been charged, Lake County Major Crime Task Force spokesman Christopher Covelli said Monday that authorities were using the terms “suspect” and “person of interest” interchangeably and that they believe Crimo was responsible for the shooting, according to the Sun-Times.

“At the moment, we’re waiting for the charges to be levied against the individual,” Rotering said Tuesday. “And frankly, my greater focus this morning, as the sun is rising, is how my community is feeling – the unbelievable sadness, the unbelievable shock. This tragedy never should have arrived at our doorsteps. And as a small town, everybody knows somebody who was affected by this directly, and of course, we’re all still reeling.”

Rotering also told “Today” that she knew Crimo when he was a child.

“I don’t believe he was previously known to police until yesterday,” she said. “I know him as somebody who was a Cub Scout when I was the Cub Scout leader. And it’s one of those things where you step back and you say, ‘What happened? How did somebody become this angry, this hateful to then take it out on innocent people who literally were just having a family day out?’”