SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- A violent start to the new year in the city of South Bend, with five shootings confirmed already, and two of them deadly.
While violent crime dropped overall in 2025, a 21-year-old was killed near downtown this week, and it's not clear if he was targeted or just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Police tell me they are working long hours to get answers for people, and sometimes not even leaving work to eat or sleep.
Five shootings to start 2026, and the year isn't even two weeks old.
It's far from the start to the new year and those in the city were hoping for, certainly not South Bend's mayor James Mueller.
"The question is, what happens from here on out, are there retaliations, are there further violence that spirals from this, or are we able to get a hold of it and get back to times of no shooting so I think it's too early to tell how 2026 will go," said Mueller.
Mayor Mueller, South Bend police chief Scott Ruszkowski, and other members of SBPD held their quarterly public safety update Tuesday,
but as good as the news of a decline in violent crime in 2025 is, the updates to start 2026 are not.
"It's very frustrating, Kayla mentioned we still have three open cases from q3 q4, detectives don't stop working, they're still working, but when you have what we had in the first couple weeks of this year, they have to stop what they're doing with those cases and attend to these ones, they haven't given up, they just double or triple at times," said SBPD Chief Scott Ruszkowski.
These violent crimes are hard to predict, but Chief Ruszkowski says keeping a level head can help.
"At the bare minimum, with putting that passion part aside, that heat of the moment, someone knows that something bad is about to happen, and again, this isn't predictive this is preventive, and we can intervene," said Ruszkowski.
"I think common sense gun legislation would be good to lower the temperature, generally, working together as a society, whether that's social media or others to lower the temperature, not the temperature outside but the temperature of argument and discord," said Mueller.
South Bend police detective Captain Kayla Miller tells ABC57 this has been an extremely trying time for South Bend police, even before the holidays in late December, which included a homicide and officer involved shootings.