At just after 4:30pm, police sifting through a mulch pile in the yard of 433 Fairway Avenue found what they were looking for: a silver, wooden-handled revolver that may have been used in today’s broad daylight shooting on Fairway Avenue.

The shooting was preceded by a brief high-speed chase involving three cars, according to a witness, who says he watched as a red car and a white minivan careered down Fairway before shots rang out and the white minivan collided with a fence just west of Caroline Avenue. A third silver or gray car was also involved in the chase, says the witness, but he believes the shooter was inside the red car.

The first 911 calls came in at 2:45pm, according to Charlottesville Police Sgt. Ronnie Roberts, and police discovered three occupants of the white minivan injured. According to Roberts, two African American men were transported to UVA hospital with gunshot wounds– one injured seriously. The vehicle’s third occupant, an African American female, had injured her foot, possibly when the vehicle crashed. No further details about the victims has been released.

The yellow tape cordoning off the intersection of Fairway and Caroline Avenues is reminiscent of another recent crime, the November 2007 shooting of St. Clair Avenue resident Jayne McGowan. The alleged perpetrators in that crime abandoned her stolen car in the woods just a few hundred feet away from the same intersection.

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