Three people have been arrested on murder charges – and a fourth person on an attempted murder charge – in a weekend shooting that left six dead and more than a dozen injured in a small Mississippi town, the FBI announced on Monday.
Teviyon L Powell, 29, William Bryant, 29, and Morgan Lattimore, 25, have been charged with capital murder, while Latoya A Powell, 44, has been charged with attempted murder in the mass shooting, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Jackson field office said.
It was not immediately clear whether they have attorneys. The Associated Press left a voicemail with the Washington county public defender’s office asking if its attorneys are representing the defendants.
The shooting, which came as people celebrated homecoming weekend in downtown Leland shortly after a high school football game, was the deadliest of several shootings across Mississippi over the weekend. Other shootings were reported at two Mississippi universities on Saturday as those schools celebrated their homecoming weekends.
Authorities have not disclosed a possible motive for Friday night’s shooting in Leland, but the FBI said the gunfire appeared to have been “sparked by a disagreement among several individuals”. The spokesperson said without elaborating in an email late on Monday that “other arrests are pending” as the investigation continues into the shooting in the rural north-west Delta region.
Four of the victims died at the scene, where abandoned shoes were left and blood stained the pavement of a downtown street the following day.
Witness Camish Hopkins described seeing people wounded and bleeding and four people dead on the ground. “It was the most horrific scene I’d ever seen,” Hopkins told the AP.
The shooting in Leland was among at least 14 mass killings in the US in 2025, according to the nonpartisan Gun Violence Archive. Mass killings are defined as cases in which four or more victims are intentionally killed.
High numbers of mass killings in the US annually have prompted many to call on the federal government to provide more substantial gun control. But Congress has largely been unwilling or unable to heed such calls.
Elsewhere, in the small town of Heidelberg on the east side of the state, the bodies of two people, including a pregnant woman, were found on a high school campus on Friday night. That shooting happened the same evening Heidelberg high school played its homecoming football game, according to police and Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves. Police have not said exactly when the gunfire occurred or how close it was to the stadium.
An 18-year-old man was arrested and charged with two counts of murder and illegally having a gun on a school campus in the Heidelberg shooting, Jasper county jail records show.
Heidelberg, a town of about 640 residents, is about 85 miles (135km) south-east of the state capital of Jackson.
On Saturday evening, three people also were found with apparent gunshot wounds on the Alcorn State University campus in Claiborne county, the Mississippi bureau of investigation said. One of the victims died, the agency said. Police found the victims after a call reporting shots fired in the area of the industrial technology building. No arrests were announced.
The shooting happened after a crowd of more than 7,000 watched Alcorn State defeat Lincoln University of Oakland, California, in the Mississippi school’s homecoming game on Saturday afternoon.
In Jackson, police responded at about 7pm Saturday to the tailgating area of Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, where Jackson State University hosted Alabama State University. A juvenile had been shot in the abdomen and was taken to a hospital, police said. No arrests were announced, and few other details about that shooting were immediately available.
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