A search for suspects in Ohio who opened fire near a busy street festival stretched into Sunday after 12 people were wounded in the weekend shooting that sent crowds scrambling for cover in a historic Toledo neighborhood.
Each of the dozen victims — ranging from teenagers to people in their 60s — were in stable condition, the Toledo Police Department said Sunday. No arrests have been made and authorities have not identified any potential suspects.
The gunfire erupted Saturday near the Old West End Festival, a popular annual summer gathering along streets dotted with Victorian homes. Videos posted to social media showed people running at the sound of gunfire and medics tending to the wounded in a park filled with event tents and food trucks.
Toledo Deputy Police Chief Joe Heffernan has said it appeared that at least two people fired weapons and were “probably shooting at each other.”
As the search for the shooters wore on, Lucas County Prosecutor Julia Bates vowed “justice will be swift and strong.”
“Those who were frightened, traumatized or harmed by this violence will remain at the forefront of our efforts. I’ve felt outrage before, but this is personal,” Bates said in a statement. "This is my home. These are my friends and neighbors. It is not OK.”
In a brief update posted to social media Sunday, Toledo police said investigators were continuing to make progress and were following multiple leads. Authorities have urged festivalgoers to come forward with any photos or videos that might have caught a glimpse of the suspects.
Hundreds of people were at the festival, an annual two-day celebration in Toledo’s historic district featuring live music, food vendors, home tours and shopping. Located in northwest Ohio near the western edge of Lake Erie, Toledo is about 55 miles (90 kilometers) southwest of Detroit.
“As far as violence, this is over the top, right?” Toledo police Lt. Dan Gerken said Saturday. “Twelve people being shot, that’s the most I’ve been to a scene. I’ve been to a lot of scenes, but this is way over the top.”
The remainder of the festival was canceled Sunday. Organizers said “it would not be compassionate, responsible or possible" to continue through the weekend.
“We are heartbroken about those that were injured at the Old West End Festival,” the festival said in a statement.
The victims ranged in age from 14 to 61, with most of them in their early 20s. Fire Chief Allison Armstrong said it was difficult for emergency responders to get the injured to the hospital due to closed roads and traffic leaving the festival, but all were transported within an hour.
Kevin Berry was sitting in the neighborhood arboretum listening to live music with friends when he heard gunshots ring out.
“Everybody hit the deck,” he said.
When Berry looked back up, he saw a gun being tossed to the ground less than 50 feet (15 meters) away from him. Officers who were already on site for the festival responded immediately.
Berry, who has medical training and served in the Navy, walked around looking for anyone who might need help and saw at least five people with gunshot wounds.
George Kral, the city’s safety director, said the Old West End Festival is one of the most iconic festivals in Toledo.
“And it’s a shame that something like this had to ruin it," Kral said.
The Ohio shooting was one of at least two episodes of mass gun violence in the U.S. over the weekend.
In Kansas City, Missouri, nine adults were injured in a shooting early Saturday, police said. Officers dispatched to the area about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of downtown found a large crowd dispersing. Police said none of the victims had life-threatening injuries and that no suspects were in custody.
Police investigate where multiple people were shot at a community festival at Agnes Reynolds Jackson Arboretum Saturday, June 6, 2026, in Toledo, Ohio. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
The Agnes Reynolds Jackson Arboretum is shown where multiple people were shot at a community festival Saturday, June 6, 2026, in Toledo, Ohio. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
Harvard University professor Robert Coles, the psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who championed the cause of children grappling with poverty and segregation, has died at 97, his son said Sunday.
The son, also named Robert Coles, told The Associated Press that his father died Thursday at a hospice center in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
The elder Coles was famed for documenting the needs of children, particularly those caught in the crucible of social upheaval. The second and third parts of his five-volume "Children of Crisis" won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for general nonfiction.
In a 1965 Washington Post essay, he wrote that, expecting to find many psychiatric problems among the children of poverty, that instead "I was constantly surprised at the endurance shown by children we would all call poor or, in the current fashion, 'culturally disadvantaged.'"
"What enabled such children from such families to survive emotionally and educationally ordeals I feel sure many white middle-class boys and girls would find impossible?"
He would visit the same families repeatedly in order to get to know them well, and brought along crayons to allow the children he studied to draw pictures about their experiences and perceptions.
He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. He also was one of the first recipients of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." In 1999, a panel of judges ranked "Children of Crisis" as No. 44 on its list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction.
The "Children of Crisis" books came out from 1967 to 1978. His first book focused on the effects of desegregation on children. The second looked at life among migrant workers, sharecroppers and others dwelling in mountain areas.
He subtitled the third volume "The South Goes North" as it focused on both Black and white Southerners who moved into urban areas in the North. The fourth looked at children of Native American origin, as well as Alaska Natives and Hispanic children. A fifth volume examined children of wealth and privilege.
His other books included "Their Eyes Meeting the World," exploring the meanings of children's drawings; "The Moral Life of Children," "The Political Life of Children" and "The Spiritual Life of Children." He also wrote books on psychoanalyst Anna Freud and reformer Dorothy Day.
While many of his books probed conditions in the United States, he also studied children around the world. In all, he wrote more than 50 books and hundreds of articles and essays.
Some of his peers found his work to be more that of a reporter and advocate than that of a psychiatrist or scientist.
"He's a very good journalist who talks to kids sensitively and tells stories well," the late Harvard professor Lawrence Kohlberg, a leading authority on moral development, told AP in 1986. "But no psychiatrist would take what he says seriously."
He had gotten interested in children's reaction to crises in the early 1960s while serving in the South as an Air Force doctor. He was particularly taken by Ruby Bridges, who was only 6 when she became the center of a storm of abuse as the first Black child in a previously all-white school in New Orleans.
"She demonstrated moral stamina; she possessed honor, courage," he said in 1986. He even wrote a children's book about her, "The Story of Ruby Bridges," in 1995. (Ruby's heroism also caught the eye of artist Norman Rockwell, who depicted her brave entrance into the school in his 1964 work "The Problem We All Live With.")
Coles' wife, Jane, helped out during the interviews with children.
"At first the children were frightened to death of us — they'd never had white people in their homes before," Coles told People magazine. "But I began to throw away my questions. I threw away my necktie. I began to sit on the floor."
The 1995 PBS documentary "Listening to Children: A Moral Journey with Robert Coles" showed him at work, interviewing a cross-section of American children and analyzing their drawings, as he had done in his books.
"A child is an opportunity and a moral challenge. How are we going to do justice to this new life with all its possibilities?" he said. "If we fail as parents, we are failing also as citizens."
Coles held a longtime appointment as a research psychiatrist at Harvard's University Health Services. In 1977, he was named professor of psychiatry and medical humanities, and in 1995, he was appointed as a professor of social ethics in the School of Education.
In a popular Harvard class he taught called the Literature of Social Reflection — jokingly called "Guilt 105" — he stressed that "we should look inward and think about the meaning of our life and its purposes," he told People magazine in 1990.
Born in Boston, Coles went on to graduate from Harvard in 1950. He received a medical degree from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1954. A 1972 Time magazine cover profile said he became interested in psychiatry as "the most philosophical of the disciplines" — and besides, he found he was unnerved when children cried when being vaccinated.
He acknowledged that he and his own family lived well, telling The New York Times in 1997, "It makes me uncomfortable, seeing the disparities between the world I document and the world I inhabit."
His wife died in 1993. They had three sons.
FILE - President Bush, left, shakes hands with Robert Coles, center, a child psychologist, researcher and professor of psychiatry from Cambridge, Mass., as first lady Laura Bush looks on during the National Endowment for the Arts Awards ceremony at Constitution Hall, April 22, 2002, in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
