For 150 years Toledo has been known as “Glass City” for its reputation as a global glass-making capital. In recent years Toledo has also been branded as “Little Chicago,” for its violent street crime and gang infestation, largely seeded by Chicago’s Gangster Disciples and Latin Kings.
Tuesday, police in Toledo described an open-fire mass shooting involving street gang rivals. The Saturday gunplay left three targeted individuals wounded according to police and nine innocent victims also hit by gunfire.
The Ohio city is at the east end of an interstate gang and gun corridor between Chicago and Toledo, a roadway that has plagued law enforcement for decades.
Now, as police in Ohio still search for suspects and answers in the latest Midwestern mass shooting, investigators reveal that the shootout occurred between members of rival street gangs, all unfolding in a city where Chicago street gangs have “franchised” neighborhood criminal organizations for decades.
On Tuesday Toledo officials and community leaders held a somber briefing about the gunfight. Toledo’s police chief — without using the word gang — described what was a gang gunfight according to investigators, at a community summer festival in a Toledo park.
“In the video evidence we have, in the interviews we’ve conducted, this is most definitely two groups that were disrespecting each other,” said Toledo Police Chief Michael Troendle. “It led into a little bit of a foot chase, assaulting another individual, and at that point one person did produce a firearm and start shooting, and then someone from the rival group decided to pull his firearm and start returning fire.”
Police executed search warrants on a downtown residential street in Toledo, removing one gun that is now undergoing tests with at least one other gun recovered by police. The pair of rival gang members were armed with pistols according to investigators, wounding 12 people., including several that are still hospitalized.
Police are now searching for two known suspects.
“I will tentatively tell you that these are two black male suspects in that 18- to 24-year-old range,” said Troendle. “We are still actively pursuing leads to find them, so there’s a lot of things I cannot say at this point because I do not want to jeopardize our efforts to actually apprehend those individuals.”
Authorities are not revealing which rival groups the shooters were from. But detectives believe there are more than 30 gangs spread out across Toledo and its suburbs. A map published by the Toledo Blade newspaper in 2013 showed downtown and outlying gang turf like a patchwork on the area. Most of the gangs are ideologically linked to Chicago street gangs, which experts say descended on Toledo in the 1970’s and still supply guns and ammo via the I-90 corridor.
The unsavory “Little Chicago” nickname for Toledo is not new, but resurfaces after incidents such as last Saturday’s mass shooting. While the Chicago slur currently refers to street gang violence, that moniker actually dates back more than a hundred years when Toledo was a thriving bootlegging and organized crime mecca, in the violent style of the early Chicago Outfit.
But whichever era, Little Chicago translates into heartache for Toledo’s leaders and law-abiding citizens.
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