PALATKA, Fla. – A triple Christmas night shooting in Palatka that left two young men dead and a third man in the hospital fighting for his life was just a small portion of the gun violence that erupted during the Christmas holidays.
The same gun violence involved in the triple shooting also left bullet holes in the Palatka Daily News building.
Hours after the Christmas night shooting in Palatka, two people inside a Jacksonville nightclub were shot following a fight. One of the gunshot victims was last listed in critical condition.
Thursday evening, a person was shot in Jacksonville near the intersection of West 13th Street and Myrtle Avenue.
Holiday gun violence ran rampant across the U.S.
A fatal Christmas night shooting in Los Angeles. A fatal Christmas Eve shooting in Chicago. Three people were shot inside a Phoenix airport on Christmas following a domestic dispute.
Two teenagers were shot to death in Milwaukee on Christmas. A 6-year-old Milwaukee boy was shot on Christmas, and 10 people in South Florida were shot between Christmas Eve and early Christmas morning. Three of the South Florida victims died.
News4JAX crime and safety analyst Tom Hackney, who retired as Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Director of Investigations, said that while some holiday shootings involve people who get into domestic disputes at family gatherings, other holiday shootings include people who see the holidays as just any other ordinary day.
“It’s just another day if they’re conducting business, but it’s another day that they don’t care. They don’t care about any of it. They don’t care about lives. They don’t care about people. They don’t care about bystanders,” Hackney said.
For the past several years in Jacksonville, gun violence has erupted during the holidays.
There was a fatal Christmas Day shooting on Jacksonville’s Northside in 2023, a fatal Christmas Day shooting on Jacksonville’s Westside in 2022 and a fatal shooting at a downtown Jacksonville bar on Christmas night in 2019.
On Christmas Eve 1994, Tom Wade, a 32-year-old Marine, was shot and killed in front of his 3-year-old daughter during an armed robbery in the Arlington area. It happened after they returned home from a Christmas Eve church service. His killer was never caught.
“You think about it as a peaceful time of year or what you would hope to be a peaceful time,” Hackney said. In World War I, the song Silent Night was about people at war putting their guns down and having peace for that one little bit, and it doesn’t seem we have come away from that. It’s gotten worse."