A 23-year-old man from Hamden was shot in the leg during a drive-by attack outside a birthday party on Bridgeport's West Side late Friday night, police say, the latest in a string of gunfire incidents to hit outdoor gatherings across the city this fall. Officers responding to a 911 call of shots fired just after 10 p.m. found the scene near Wood Avenue and Grove Street, where four parked vehicles had been struck by gunfire.
Victim Drove Himself Toward Help
According to News12 New York, the wounded man did not wait for an ambulance to reach the scene. Instead, he got into a personal vehicle and was driven toward medical help, stopping at Lexington Avenue and Grand Street after the driver spotted an ambulance. Paramedics then took over, transporting him to St. Vincent's Hospital, where he is expected to recover from the gunshot wound to his leg. The man was identified as a resident of Hamden, according to DoingItLocal, meaning he had traveled to Bridgeport for the party before the shooting broke out.
Bridgeport's Detective Bureau Non-Fatal Shooting Task Force has taken over the investigation, per the same News12 account, and police are asking anyone with information to contact Detective Tim Leonard directly at 203-581-5253.
Second Birthday Party Shooting in Three Weeks
This is not the first time this fall that gunfire has interrupted an outdoor celebration in Bridgeport. Less than three weeks earlier, on September 12, police responded to a strikingly similar drive-by shooting outside a birthday party on Benham Avenue, where a 34-year-old man was critically injured after a passing vehicle fired roughly 20 rounds into a crowd that included children, according to Patch. Detectives reported that bystanders and children fled into a nearby home as the suspect vehicle sped away.
The same task force investigating Friday's shooting was also working a September 13 incident in which ShotSpotter registered 17 gunshots on Harral Avenue, leaving a victim wounded in the back before he sought refuge in a housing complex across from the Greene Homes public housing development, as reported by FOX61. The back-to-back cases illustrate how stretched the Non-Fatal Shooting Task Force and Detective Leonard have been in recent weeks, even as the city's overall violent crime numbers have been improving.
A History of Gunfire Along Wood Avenue
The intersection where Friday's shooting occurred is not new to serious gun violence. In December 2020, a 28-year-old driver was shot multiple times in his car between Iranistan Avenue and Grove Street before crashing at 178 Wood Avenue; he was pronounced dead at St. Vincent's Medical Center two hours later, FOX61 reported at the time. In July 2023, police processed another major crime scene nearby on Wood Avenue near Park Avenue after an early-morning shooting in which more than 20 rounds were fired, leaving one victim injured in the neck, according to SFGATE.
St. Vincent's, where Friday's victim was treated, is a 520-bed Level II Trauma Center operated by Hartford HealthCare that handles nearly 65,000 emergency department visits a year, per Hartford HealthCare. Bridgeport police rely on a centralized Fusion Center that merges citywide surveillance footage with real-time ShotSpotter acoustic gunshot detection to pinpoint shooting locations and speed officers to the scene, according to the National Crime Gun Intelligence Center Initiative.
Citywide Numbers Trending Down, Even as Incidents Persist
The recent cluster of shootings comes even as city officials touted a sharp overall decline in gun violence for 2025. Bridgeport recorded a 37.4% decrease in overall violent crime last year, along with a 66.7% drop in homicides — falling from 12 in 2024 to 4 in 2025 — and more than a 30% reduction in total shooting incidents citywide, FOX61 reported in January. City leaders credited strategic deployments and community-policing initiatives for the improvement.
Longer-term data compiled by the Bridgeport Police Department Fusion Intelligence Center shows non-fatal shooting victims fell by an average of 12% annually between 2019 and 2024, while acoustic ShotSpotter gunshot activations dropped from 1,183 in 2019 to 702 in 2024. Despite that multi-year downward trend, the West Side and nearby neighborhoods have continued to see sporadic bursts of serious violence, including this latest attack on a birthday gathering.
Anyone with information about the shooting is urged to contact Detective Tim Leonard or to call the Bridgeport Police Tips Line anonymously at 203-576-TIPS (203-576-8477).
