Three women were rushed to hospitals after a gunman opened fire outside a liquor store in Long Beach's Washington neighborhood late Sunday night, leaving one of them in critical condition. The shooting broke out around 11:23 p.m. in the 100 block of Pacific Coast Highway at Pine Avenue, just outside Mike's Liquor.
Two of the women suffered lower-body wounds that are not believed to be life-threatening, while the third was hospitalized in critical condition, according to the Long Beach Post. Long Beach Police Department Lieutenant Jayson Torres confirmed the shooting location and said detectives remained on scene working the investigation. As of Monday, no information about a suspect had been released, and the paper reported the case remains an active, ongoing investigation.
Video from the scene showed the crime unfolding directly outside Mike's Liquor, the same commercial strip that has drawn police response before. It is not yet known whether security footage from the store will help investigators develop a suspect description, and detectives have not said whether they believe the shooting stemmed from a dispute or a gang-related motive.
A Corner With a Violent Past
This is not the first time gunfire has erupted at this exact intersection. In March 2023, Long Beach police investigated a shooting in the parking lot of Mike's Liquor after a male victim suffered a gunshot wound and drove himself to a hospital, according to a report from that time. And in May 2020, a daytime shooting in the same 100 block of Pacific Coast Highway near Pine Avenue left a man hospitalized with an upper-body wound and pocked the wall of a neighboring doughnut shop with bullet holes.
The stretch of Pacific Coast Highway near Pine Avenue falls within the Washington neighborhood, a half-square-mile pocket of Long Beach bordered by Pacific Coast Highway, Anaheim Street, Long Beach Boulevard, and the Los Angeles River. Despite its small footprint, the neighborhood accounted for roughly 10 percent of all violent crime citywide in 2017, logging 206 violent crimes that year. The area falls within LBPD's West Beat 4, part of the department's West Patrol Division, which operates out of Santa Fe Avenue and covers West Long Beach, the Port, and surrounding commercial corridors.
City Efforts Versus a Violent Summer
The concentration of firearm violence in West Division neighborhoods prompted the city to launch the Long Beach Activating Safe Communities program, a coordinated gun violence intervention effort, after LBPD data showed the West Division once contributed more than 40 percent of the city's firearm assaults and homicides. City officials have also pointed to broader progress: Long Beach recorded 133 shooting incidents in the first half of 2025, a 29 percent drop from 188 during the same period in 2024 and below the city's five-year mid-year average of 187, with police attributing the decline to targeted deployments and illegal firearm seizures.
Those citywide numbers sit uneasily alongside a violent summer. Long Beach recorded 38 homicides in 2024, up from 26 the year before and the city's highest annual total since 2021, with the increase concentrated in the East and North divisions. More recently, Long Beach Local News reported that police investigated two homicides, seven hit shootings, and seven no-hit shootings citywide during the month of July alone, a toll that has fueled renewed frustration among residents even as officials tout multi-year reductions.
Sunday's shooting also follows a string of recent violent incidents in the city. Just weeks earlier, a July 10 shooting outside a different Long Beach liquor store critically wounded 44-year-old William Davis, who later died of his injuries in early August, prompting prosecutors to upgrade the case against the suspect to murder. Should a suspect be identified and charged in Sunday's non-fatal shooting, California law treats assault with a firearm as a wobbler offense under Penal Code Section 245(a)(2), carrying a potential state prison term of two, three, or four years, with personal use of a firearm adding a possible enhancement of up to 10 additional years under Penal Code Section 12022.5.
No arrests had been announced as of Monday, and police have not released a description of the shooter or a possible motive. The investigation remains open, according to Torres.
