Vallejo police have responded to a shooting nearly every day in the first week of the new year, public records show.
While police have not reported any homicides since a fatal shooting on New Year’s Eve, at least three people have been wounded by gunfire since Jan. 1. Police spokesperson Sgt. Rashad Hollis told Open Vallejo in an interview Monday that none of the victims died from their injuries.
The first shooting of the year was reported to police at approximately 7:21 a.m. last Thursday on the 300 block of Nevada Street. A man told police that he had been shot in the leg several hours earlier, according to dispatch audio.
On Friday, Vallejo police received multiple reports of a shooting at an apartment complex on the 1300 block of North Camino Alto. Officers found one victim with a gunshot wound to the leg, and soon discovered that another went to a nearby hospital. Police described the victim on the scene as “alert and conscious,” according to dispatch audio. Vallejo police received another report of gunshots from the apartment complex on Saturday, but Hollis said they were unable to verify the report.
“Whoever called it in wasn’t able to provide any information, and they weren’t able to find the scene, so that might have just been a bluff call or something,” Hollis said.
Across the city at the Vallejo Inn, a motel off Sonoma Boulevard and Tennessee Street, a man alerted police that he was shot in the leg around 11 a.m. on Sunday. The suspect fled in an unknown direction before police arrived, according to dispatch audio.
No arrests have been made in connection with any of the three shootings, Hollis said.
Police also responded to three instances of shots fired into occupied buildings or vehicles Monday, public records show. Police responded to one incident on the 100 block of Mulberry Street at approximately 6:16 p.m. where at least one shot entered the house through a window, but no one was hit, according to dispatch audio. Early Tuesday morning, police overheard a drive-by shooting, where officers estimated that 30 rounds were fired into a home on the 200 block of Texas Street. At the scene, officers found the home riddled with bullet holes, as well as a car with a shattered back windshield.
There have been more than 200 shooting incidents in Vallejo each of the last four years, according to police data. While violent crime has dropped significantly over the last two decades across the nation, a 2024 New York Times investigation found that the number of Americans living close to gun violence spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This month’s shootings in Vallejo come on the heels of one of Vallejo’s deadliest years in decades, with 25 killings in 2024. The city’s homicide count has remained above 20 since 2020, when there were 29 homicides.
Early Wednesday morning, Vallejo police were alerted of shots fired on the 100 block of Viewmont Avenue by its Raven system, an artificial intelligence technology that detects gunfire. Police, however, were unable to locate a crime scene, public records show.
