A three-month span of gun violence continued Sunday in Antioch, a city operating with a diminished and scandal-plagued police force, where a 23-year-old man was shot and wounded in the notorious “Sycamore corridor” area.
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Just last week, three others were shot and wounded in the same neighborhood, including an 18-year-old man who was hospitalized in critical condition. The wave of violence began Sept. 2 with the killing of 21-year-old Elijah Scales, who was shot on Peppertree Way and continued through the end of the month with another 14 people shot and injured.
On Sunday, Antioch police responded close to 3 p.m. to reports of shots fired near Peppertree Way and Sycamore Drive, finding evidence of a shooting in the roadway between Peppertree Way and Lemontree Way. Officers discovered the 23-year-old man suffering from at least one gunshot wound inside Sycamore Square. Emergency crews transported him to a hospital, where he was in critical but stable condition late Sunday, police said.
The Antioch Police Department has been trying to stabilize in the aftermath of a widespread police corruption scandal involving racist text messages, pay raise fraud and other misdeeds that led to federal indictments, convictions and lawsuits that decimated the ranks of the Antioch Police Department. At one point over the past year, the police department was operating with less than half of its 115 full-time staff on active duty. As the city has worked to hire more officers and arrange with nearby cities to share police officers, the remaining Antioch police officers have been working overtime and double time.