A shooting at a home near the intersection of Ridge Avenue and Evergreen Avenue in Wellston is under investigation this Tuesday morning, according to a North County Police spokesperson. Details remain scarce, and police have not said whether anyone was hurt or whether a suspect is in custody.
The North County Police Cooperative confirmed it is investigating the incident, as reported by First Alert 4. Police told the outlet they do not have any additional information to report as of now, and the station says it will provide further updates as they come in. No further details on injuries, victims, or a possible motive have been released.
A Small City With A Heavy Recent Caseload
Wellston is a compact city of just 0.93 square miles bordering the northwest edge of the City of St. Louis, according to background compiled by Wikipedia. Census Bureau estimates for 2024 put the city's population at 1,628 residents, with a median age of 48.1 years and a median individual income of $30,152, per Data Commons. The city was once a major industrial hub anchored by the Wagner Electric Company plant, which employed 4,500 workers during World War I before closing in 1983, leaving a 55-acre site that required years of environmental remediation.
Policing in Wellston runs through the North County Police Cooperative, a shared agency formed on June 1, 2015, when Vinita Park and Wellston agreed to combine law enforcement resources, according to reporting from Giffords.org. The cooperative now fields more than 60 commissioned officers across ten North St. Louis County municipalities, including Beverly Hills, Dellwood, Flordell Hills, Hanley Hills, Pine Lawn, Uplands Park, Velda City, Velda Village Hills, Vinita Park, and Wellston, per the agency's own account. Each municipality keeps its own precinct office, but command staff operates out of Vinita Park.
Recent Violence Has Tested The Cooperative
Tuesday's shooting is not the first violent incident the cooperative has had to untangle in Wellston this year. In June, officers responded to a fatal rush-hour shooting near Page and Kingshighway inside Wellston's jurisdiction, a case Hoodline covered in its report, Rush-Hour Gunfire Turns Deadly, which noted that St. Louis Metropolitan Police initially arrived at the boundary intersection before handing the case to North County officers. If the Ridge and Evergreen investigation escalates into a complex felony case, detectives from the cooperative's Bureau of Criminal Investigations serve as members of the Greater St. Louis Major Case Squad, a regional group that pools investigators from multiple agencies for major violent crimes.
The cooperative has also faced scrutiny over its own officers in recent years. In 2019, North County Police Cooperative Officer Michael Langsdorf was shot and killed while responding to a report of a bad check being passed at the Wellston Food Market on Page Avenue, killed during a struggle inside the market just three months after joining the force. More recently, reporting published in May confirmed that a cooperative officer shot and killed K-9 Officer Oya during a July 2024 foot pursuit near Wells Avenue in Wellston, a friendly-fire incident the department did not publicly attribute until internal review and body-camera disclosures were complete.
Just over a week before Tuesday's shooting, former North County Police Cooperative officer Marcellis Blackwell pleaded guilty in federal court to 18 counts of deprivation of rights for sexually abusing men he detained or arrested while on duty between November 2022 and June 2023. Federal prosecutors said Blackwell routinely deactivated his body-worn camera during the assaults in isolated locations, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. That case, detailed in a separate Hoodline report on the officer's guilty plea, has added to the pressure facing the small, multi-jurisdictional agency even as it works the Ridge and Evergreen case.
For now, police have offered no timeline on when more details about Tuesday's shooting might be released. First Alert 4 says it will continue updating the story as new information becomes available.
