Gainesville city leaders say large crowds at an Easter egg hunt, where a shooting took place, should have been better managed by police.
The shooting happened at TB McPherson Park on Sunday evening at around 8:15pm.
Three people were injured — police say one of them is still in critical condition.
Speaking at the General Policy Committee meeting on Thursday, City Manager Cynthia Curry said the permit for the egg hunt allowed 400 people to be in the park, but ended up drawing crowds of approximately 2,000 people in the surrounding area and nearby streets.
“ The event was bigger than any of them could manage at that point in time,” Curry said.
“You have to ask people to leave. That didn’t occur.”
Curry says organizers for the event filed an application through the Gainesville Police Department, which was then routed to other city departments including Gainesville Fire Rescue and the Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Department. Curry said she was not included in the permitting process and would have denied the permit based on the crowd size of a previous event, known as Peaceful Sundays, that caused public safety issues at the park.
“Based on the history of what we have dealt with for many, many years, it quite frankly just took common sense, and not a check of a box on a form to say, ‘Let’s stop and think about this,'” she said.
Curry added: “I never got that opportunity to do that, and I am very disappointed. I am very dismayed and I am very saddened based on what finally resulted.”
Police Chief Nelson Moya also spoke at the General Policy Committee meeting. He said more than 15 police officers were on site to handle post-event crowds expected on University Avenue, at Wawa and other locations.
“And we were still inundated,” he said.
Moya said event organizers asked police staff around 7 p.m. on the night of the event to extend the permit to 8 p.m., but that request was denied.
“At 7 p.m., we began to see the influx of people trying to get into the park so we knew that we had to end it,” he said.
Police say their investigation into the shooting is still ongoing. Video footage shows a Black man wearing red shirts and a grey hoodie firing shots into the crowd. No arrests have been made.
