As midnight came and the old year gave way to 2013 Tuesday morning, the sky over St. Thomas lit up with gunfire and the switchboard at the 911 center lit up with calls complaining about the barrage.
The calls actually started coming in much earlier; the earliest weapons discharge call was received at 4:55 p.m. from Estate Frydenhoj. By the time "the ball dropped" at midnight, the police had received a dozen calls.
From midnight to 12:10 a.m. the emergency operators logged another 12 calls from all across St. Thomas.
After the first dozen calls in the first 10 minutes of 2013, the pace continued hot and heavy. Between 12:10 and 1 a.m. the 911 dispatchers on St. Thomas had received another 14 calls, bringing the total from Monday afternoon to 1 a.m. Tuesday morning to 38 calls.
On St. Croix, however, the 911 log shows only three calls specifically listed as "weapons," and only one of those came after midnight.
But that doesn’t mean there was a dearth of New Year’s aerial gunnery. One caller told the Source that he was in Estate Castle Burke on Monday night and said at midnight there was "a sustained, heavy barrage of gunfire from all directions. It lasted at least 15 minutes." The caller said he recognized the sound of several different pistols, two shotguns and rapid firing that indicated at least one semi-automatic weapon.
The caller said he did not call police. Asked why, he said, "I guess I figured if they fired off all their ammunition they wouldn’t have anything left to shoot each other with."
Several St. Thomas residents sent audio recordings of the sounds of gunfire echoing in the night sky, punctuating the solemn tolling of church bells. One contributor, who is familiar with firearms, identified at least seven weapons in the recording he made above All Saints Church and School – five pistols: a .22, a 9 mm, a 40 mm, a .357 and a .45, plus shotguns and "the Big One," a .223 long gun. The gunfire continued off and on for at least two and a half hours, he said.
Other audio recordings include what sound like the sharp, staccato bursts of automatic weapons.
The recordings are also notable for the amount of barking from terrified dogs.
On the St. Thomas 911 blotter, calls came from all over the island – from Savan to Havensight, Hospital Ground, Emancipation Garden, Lindbergh Bay and Catherineberg, to name a few.
While a handful of those calls were recorded with the notation "illegal discharge of firearms," the vast majority bear the notation, "unfounded," which according to a source familiar with the emergency response system means officers went to the scene but were unable to find anyone with a weapon.
