HANOVER COUNTY, Va. — The Hanover County Sheriff's Office received multiple calls for service to an address where a teenager was later shot and killed on Saturday. Even though the calls were low-priority, Sergeant Steve Wills, with the Hanover Sheriff's Office, said deputies still responded within a short amount of time but that in between responses, the situation escalated "beyond their control."
Here's the timeline of calls for service, according to Wills:
At 9:47 p.m. on Saturday, the sheriff's office received two calls reporting parking complaints on McClellan Road.
Callers said that vehicles were partially blocking the street and parked on private roads.
Officers started to respond at 9:55 p.m., and arrived at 10:06 p.m.
Once there, Wills said deputies spoke to an adult who said she owned the house. Officers asked people to move their vehicles, and they complied.
Deputies asked whether any minors were there and if alcohol was involved, and the owner said no.
That later turned out to not be true, according to Wills.
The deputies didn't see anything else unusual, so they cleared the scene and left.
“There was no further reason for us to be able to get into that house based on the lack of any alcohol present that we could see and having communication with an adult that was on scene. At that point, they complied with our request to move vehicles. And going further from there, there wasn't much more else we could do," Wills said. "Then we left and unfortunately, the situation grew worse upon the second call for service. But that was all beyond our control."
One hour after the initial call, at 10:46 p.m., deputies received another call reporting more parking complaints and a loud party.
At 10:51 p.m., officers were dispatched back to the house with the idea that they wanted to shut it down.
As deputies were arriving for a second time at 11:05 p.m., they were informed of shots fired, though they did not witness or hear the gunshots themselves.
They then found a 16-year-old boy who had been shot and killed.
The teenage victim's name has not been pubically released and the circumstances surrounding the shooting are still unclear.
“Right now, all I can say is we know there was some sort of altercation, but we do not know anything— We don't have an identity for a suspect at this time. We're still working to figure that out. We're still working to determine if somebody there knows who this individual was. We don't know exactly what the altercation was about, and we don't know any relationship between the victim and the suspect at this point," Wills said.
At the time the 911 calls were coming in, Wills said about 30 deputies were on duty, shifts were overlapping, and a few officers were even working overtime.
So even though the initial calls were minor, Wills said officers were available to respond.
“Their response was fairly swift and the amount of people that were there in that period of time. Reading through the notes and other things being discussed, as deputies were responding back for the second time, they were asking for additional officers to come because they were discussing, ‘We're probably going to have to shut this party down. Let's get more people out here with us.’ So we had a lot of people already in route before the shooting happened," Wills said.
Wills said the investigation is complex because of how many people were at the party.
Anyone with information is asked to contact the Hanover County Sheriff's Office.
This is a developing story, so anyone with more information can email newstips@wtvr.com to send a tip.
