(Washington) Many questions remained unanswered Monday in Alabama, in the southern United States, after a birthday party over the weekend escalated into shootings, killing four young people aged 17 to 23 and in injuring nearly thirty.

Since the events on Saturday evening in the small town of Dadeville, the authorities have maintained an unusual silence in a country where the police are used to communicating about shootings, tragedies that punctuate the daily life of Americans.

The police limited their statements and leaked very few details about the circumstances.

The authorities have thus still not announced whether one or more suspects had been arrested or remained at large, nor the motive behind these shots.

We just know that the facts occurred during the party of a teenager, who was celebrating her 16th birthday in a dance hall in Dadeville and that four deaths are to be deplored.

In a statement provided to AFP, the Tallapoosa County forensic officer said the four people who died, three black men and one black woman, were between 17 and 23 years old.

Twenty-eight other people were injured, some seriously, Alabama police spokesman Sergeant Jeremy Burkett said at a press conference.

“I assure you that you are doing everything we can,” Sergeant Burkett told AFP on Monday.

The day before, he said investigators were following a “methodical” information-gathering process to figure out who was in that room.

“We’re not going to rush into risking failure,” he said.

“We need to get information from locals,” Burkett insisted at a press conference on Sunday. “I can’t stress this enough. Even if you think it’s minor, you should definitely tell us. »

“Solid leads” are being explored, Dadeville police told ABC News.

Among the victims is Philstavious Dowdell, the older brother of the teenager who was celebrating her birthday. The 18-year-old was an accomplished athlete who received a scholarship to play American football at Jacksonville State University.

His future college coach said Sunday that Philstavious Dowdell was “a great young man with a bright future.”

The party seems to have degenerated when the mother of the young girl who was celebrating her birthday announced to the guests that she had learned that people were armed, asking them to leave, according to media.

Witnesses said they heard the first shots a few minutes later.

One of those injured on Saturday evening participated in a rally the next afternoon in tribute to the victims, still in his hospital uniform, according to the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper.

“I saw a group of girls dancing, and that’s when the shots rang out,” Taniya Cox said.

The young woman said she saw “other shooters” as she walked through the room, a detail that has not been confirmed by police. “They told me to get out or I’d get shot. »

Taniya Cox said she was shot twice in the right arm.

Despite the young age of the victims and the tragic circumstances, this shooting did not make headlines in the United States and provoked relatively little political reaction, even though President Joe Biden expressed emotion that the United States was “ again bereaved” by gunfire.

The repetition of tragedies of this type – a few days earlier, a man had killed five people in a bank in Kentucky – reinforces a certain fatalism in public opinion.

The country, which has more individual weapons than inhabitants, pays a heavy price for their dissemination.

The very high death rate from firearms is without comparison with that of other developed countries.