SILVER SPRING, Md. — Some shop owners in Silver Spring got a rude awakening Monday morning when police told them their businesses were damaged by gunfire overnight.
According to a statement from Montgomery County Police Department, at around 2 a.m. Monday, an off-duty officer called 911 about a fight at the Society Lounge located on Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring. Within moments, at around 2:15 a.m., he informed police he heard shots fired in the area. Police received other 911 calls from people reporting the sounds of gunshots.
Officers responded to the 900 block of Bonifant Street where they discovered multiple storefronts with bullet holes and broken windows, police said. At least five businesses sustained damage, including Krem Lash and Brow Bar, Nancy's Nail Salon, and Danny Hair Studio. Photos from the scene show windows smashed, but there is no estimate of the cost of the damage.
Police say no one was hit by the gunfire, and no injuries have been reported.
A vehicle that may be related to the incident was recovered, according to police.
A business owner on Bonifant Street in downtown Silver Spring showed WUSA9 a portion of her surveillance video showing a person running by the business. She said that’s all that cameras captured in the seconds after someone unloaded a gun hitting 5 storefronts.
“Silver Spring right now is a little scary,” said Danny Gedamu.
Gedamu’s business, Danny’s Hair Studio, was boarded up on the outside Monday and on the inside, a barber cut a client’s hair in a chair that now has a bullet hole in its headrest. Many of the business owners on the strip were too frightened to go on camera saying the violence is out of control.
“I’m getting tired of it,” said one passerby who came by to see the damage for himself. “There’s too much going on. This is supposed to be nice because this is downtown Silver Spring but there’s something going on like every week it seems like.”
WUSA9 spoke to MCPD Chief Marcus Jones on Saturday after Montgomery County States Attorney John McCarthy announced he was launching a task force to look into the rise in violence and crime in the Silver Spring area. McCarthy warned that Silver Spring has been turning into an "open-air drug market."
Jones told WUSA9, ahead of Monday's shooting, while he is concerned about the open drug dealing in Silver Spring, he was even more concerned about a rise in shootings police are seeing in Silver Spring because "it shows a true safety issue."
"We want to address all crime and we don’t want anyone to believe that they have the ability, just because they felt like maybe the temperature in the room had calmed down and that we as the police were not going to engage with them I think, we want to show them that that’s not the case," Jones said.
He believes police "have a winning strategy" to bring down crime in the Silver Spring area that will make people feel safer.
"We’ve actually beefed up our patrols and more of a concerted effort on addressing the crime in the central business district of Silver Spring and so for us, we see that its an opportunity for us to engage more," Jones said on Saturday.
Silver Spring police district investigators are continuing to investigate this shooting and urge anyone with more information to call 240-773-6870 or 240-773-TIPS.