Halloween Weekend 2026: Shootings Across the Country and How They Compare

Public Safety
Written by Don Bradford
Halloween Weekend 2026: Shootings Across the Country and How They Compare

Halloween Weekend 2026: Shootings Across the Country and How They Compare

LodiEye — [Month Year]

At a Glance

Mass shootings over the 2026 Halloween weekend killed at least seven people and wounded more than 40 across six cities, with Dallas accounting for the worst of it. Nearly all of the violence happened in bar districts and at large public gatherings after midnight rather than at trick-or-treat events or house parties, and where police have described a cause, it was a fight that escalated. On the national tallies available, the weekend sits in the usual range for recent years: below 2023, the worst recent Halloween weekend, and close to 2022 on deaths. Two of the cities have very different stories underneath the headlines. Dallas's Deep Ellum district has been in a two-year run of shootings that a new safety plan has not stopped, while Birmingham's weekend came against the sharpest homicide decline in the city's modern record. One Northern California incident, at the Spirit Halloween store in Fairfield's Solano Town Center, was a targeted shooting rather than a crowd incident. Closer to home, Stockton had gunfire exchanged near a house party with no one hit, and Lodi had no gunfire at all and its quietest weekend of October by call volume.

7
Killed in mass shootings, Friday through Sunday
42
Wounded in mass shootings
6
Cities with a shooting of four or more victims
4
Killed in Dallas's Deep Ellum, the deadliest scene

What Happened, City by City

The Associated Press counted at least six dead and dozens wounded in mass shootings over the weekend, spread across roughly half a dozen cities. Adding the Friday shooting in Fairfield brings the death count to seven. The figures below are from police and wire reports as of the evening of November 1 and will likely change as investigations continue.

Dallas, Texas: 4 dead, 15 wounded

Three shootings between midnight and about 1:30 a.m. Sunday in the Deep Ellum entertainment district, over a span of roughly an hour and 15 minutes. Police Chief Daniel Comeaux said investigators were still working to determine whether the three were related and that some arrests had been made, without saying how many or on what charges. The department had increased its presence in the district ahead of Halloween crowds and asked the public for videos and photos. Several live music venues in the area had advertised Halloween events that night. Nothing has been released on motive. No officers were hurt.

Birmingham, Alabama: 1 dead, 8 wounded

Two separate shootings just outside Legion Field after the Magic City Classic, the annual Alabama State–Alabama A&M game that drew close to 70,000 fans. Mayor Randall Woodfin said three people were shot near the vendor area on Graymont Avenue and six more at a second location near the tailgate area. Police Chief Michael Pickett said most spectators had already left the stadium grounds. One person was detained for questioning and multiple weapons were recovered. A teenager was being held but had not been charged in either incident as of Sunday.

Newark, Delaware: 6 shot

Late Saturday on Main Street beside the University of Delaware campus. All six were hospitalized; police had no condition updates Sunday afternoon. Video on social media showed people running from the scene, and a stretch of Main Street was closed for several hours.

Bloomington, Illinois: 1 dead, 1 critical

Early Sunday near Illinois Wesleyan University. A 19-year-old woman was killed and another woman was in critical condition. Six others had injuries that were not life-threatening, though the police department and the McLean County coroner did not say whether those were gunshot wounds.

Fayetteville, Arkansas: 6 wounded

Early Sunday. Six people were taken to hospitals with gunshot wounds. No arrests had been made. Police said a preliminary investigation indicated an altercation preceded the shooting.

Fairfield, California: 1 dead, 6 wounded

Friday, inside the Spirit Halloween store at the Solano Town Center mall. Police described it as a targeted attack. The 31-year-old woman who died was pregnant, according to family members. Six other people were wounded.

Madison Heights, Michigan: 1 dead

Friday afternoon at a Spirit Halloween store north of Detroit. A 21-year-old man was fatally shot. A man taken into custody was assaulted by bystanders during the arrest and was hospitalized with injuries that were not life-threatening. With a single victim, this one does not meet the four-victim threshold used in the national counts.

How the Weekend Compares with Prior Years

National tallies for Halloween weekend come almost entirely from the Gun Violence Archive, which counts a mass shooting as four or more people shot, not including the shooter. The counting windows vary from year to year, with some running Friday through Sunday and some through Monday, and the first reports are usually revised in the days that follow. The comparison below is rough for those reasons. Comparable national tallies for 2024 and 2025 could not be located, so those years appear in the table with their best-known incidents but are left off the chart rather than estimated.

Halloween weekend mass shootings in the United States, by year

Source: Gun Violence Archive as reported by Fox News (2021), The Washington Post via ASIS (2022), The Hill and NPR (2023); Associated Press and police reports (2026) | Mass shooting = four or more people shot, excluding the shooter. Victims = killed plus wounded. 2026 figures are preliminary as of Nov. 1, 2026. The 2021 incident count was not reported in the sources used.

YearWindow countedIncidentsKilledWoundedVictimsNotable incidents
2021Sat–Sunn/a125264Suburban Chicago Halloween party (2 dead, more than a dozen wounded); Texarkana party (1 dead, 9 wounded)
2022Fri–Mon9104656Chicago drive-by on Halloween night, 14 to 15 wounded including three children
2023Fri–Sun13127991Tampa's Ybor City (2 dead, 16 to 18 wounded); Texarkana (3 dead); Chicago party (15 wounded); days after the Lewiston, Maine shooting
2024—————No national tally located. Downtown Orlando (2 dead, shooter fired into holiday crowds); Northglenn, Colo. house party (3 dead, 3 wounded)
2025—————No national tally located
2026 (preliminary)Fri–Sun674249Dallas Deep Ellum (4 dead, 15 wounded); Birmingham; Newark, Del.; Bloomington, Ill.; Fayetteville, Ark.; Fairfield, Calif.

The 2026 killed figure includes the Fairfield victim; the AP's headline count of six covered the Saturday-night shootings. Madison Heights (1 dead) and Bloomington's six unspecified injuries are not counted. The 2023 figures were reported as 12 to 13 incidents, 11 to 12 dead and 76 to 79 wounded depending on when the count was taken; the later figures are used here.

On the numbers available, 2026 sits in the usual range: well below 2023 and close to 2022 on deaths. The calendar is one difference worth noting. Halloween fell on a Saturday this year, which put the holiday, bar closing time, and a full weekend crowd on the same night. In 2022 it was a Monday, in 2023 a Tuesday, in 2024 a Thursday, and in 2025 a Friday.

Common Threads

The pattern across the weekend is stronger than in some prior years. Nearly every incident happened in a bar district or at a large public event: Deep Ellum's clubs, the vendor row outside Legion Field, Newark's Main Street, and the college-town districts in Fayetteville and Bloomington. The 2023 weekend had the same shape. The AP noted then that many of the incidents involved altercations arising from Halloween celebrations, including Tampa's, which started as bars closed and costumed crowds filled the street.

The timing clustered after midnight. The Dallas, Fayetteville, Bloomington and Newark shootings all came between roughly midnight and 3 a.m., when bars empty. Where police have said anything about cause, it was a fight that escalated rather than a planned attack. Fayetteville said so directly, and Dallas has a long record of the same.

Police were already in place in the two largest scenes. Dallas had added officers in Deep Ellum for the night. Birmingham had a large security presence for a 70,000-person game. The shootings happened anyway, at the edges of the crowd and after people started to disperse. Victims skewed young: a 19-year-old killed in Bloomington, and the Newark and Fayetteville scenes next to campuses.

The exception: Fairfield

The Solano Town Center shooting was a targeted attack inside a store on a Friday afternoon. It landed on Halloween weekend and shares the holiday with the others, but it belongs to a different category than the after-midnight crowd shootings that made up the rest of the weekend.

What Each City Was Already Dealing With

Dallas and Deep Ellum

This is the city with the deepest backstory. After three years of falling crime, Deep Ellum's equilibrium broke in 2025. The Deep Ellum Foundation responded with a 42-page Community Safety Plan 2.0 that calls for doubling the Dallas Police Deep Ellum Task Force to two eight-officer shifts and launching a youth violence-interrupter pilot. The city began closing two of the district's busiest streets to car traffic on Friday and Saturday nights. A property owner sought a restraining order to shut down a club it described as the center of crime in the district, and council members pushed for stricter enforcement on restaurants. The shootings continued: a July 2025 incident that killed one and injured several, including one involving a police officer; a Cinco de Mayo 2026 shooting that left police seeking persons of interest; and three wounded in August 2026 with an AK-47 recovered. Halloween night was the worst night in a long run, not a surprise.

Birmingham

Birmingham is the opposite story. The city ended 2024 with 152 homicides, the most since 1933. Through the third quarter of 2026 it had recorded 34, compared with 61 at the same point in 2025 and 129 in 2024. Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama credited Mayor Woodfin's "A Safer City for All" initiative with a 50 percent year-over-year drop. The city's past trouble has included shootings at illegal car exhibitions and a run of homicides over a Labor Day weekend, which is the same kind of large informal gathering as Saturday night's postgame crowd.

Newark, Delaware

Main Street beside the University of Delaware has a record of nuisance-level incidents: shots fired with no injuries in April 2023, and teenagers shooting pedestrians with splatter balls from passing cars in 2022. Its recent public-safety work has been about traffic, after crashes killed UD students and the city added speed bumps and other upgrades on Main Street. Six people shot on Main Street is far outside that pattern.

Fairfield, California

Solano Town Center has had trouble before. At one point the mall saw two shootings within a month, including one in which a 16-year-old from Sacramento was arrested. Fairfield has also seen a targeted fatal shooting in the Fairfield High School parking lot immediately after a graduation ceremony. Friday's shooting fits that local pattern of interpersonal violence more than the Halloween crowd pattern seen elsewhere.

Fayetteville, Bloomington and Madison Heights

Little local backstory surfaced for any of these three. All are relatively low-homicide places where a multi-victim shooting is itself the news. Fayetteville is home to the University of Arkansas and Bloomington to Illinois Wesleyan, and both incidents look like the same college-weekend dynamic as Newark, but police had said little as of Sunday.

Closer to Home: Stockton and Lodi

San Joaquin County got through the weekend without anything close to what happened in Dallas or Fairfield. In Stockton, the one confirmed incident was a shots-fired call around 9:03 p.m. Saturday near Hepburn Circle and Chaplin Court, where a house party of roughly 100 people was under way. Councilmember Michele Padilla said people in separate vehicles exchanged gunfire. Officers recovered shell casings but found no victims, no homes or cars struck, and no one arrived at a hospital with a gunshot wound. Families with trick-or-treating children were pulled indoors. No arrests had been reported as of Sunday. Earlier in the week, on Monday, October 26, Stockton police handled two shootings within 30 minutes of each other, a car shot at in the Lakeview District and a man wounded near East Oak Street; those were ordinary for the city rather than tied to the holiday.

Lodi had no gunfire at all. Lodi Police Department calls for service, as published in the Lodi411 police reports explorer, show 170 calls from Friday through Sunday: 59 on Friday, 62 on Halloween Saturday and 49 on Sunday. The three prior Friday-through-Sunday weekends in October ran 213, 215 and 196 calls, so by volume Halloween weekend was the quietest of the month.

Lodi Police calls for service, October weekends (Friday through Sunday)

Source: Lodi Police Department calls for service via Lodi411 | Alcohol = DUI, intoxicated person and liquor violation calls. Violent = battery, robbery and brandishing calls. Halloween weekend is Oct. 30 through Nov. 1, 2026.

Alcohol calls came to 10 for the weekend: three Friday, four Saturday and three Sunday. Only two were DUI, both on Sunday, one at 1:56 a.m. on West Oak Street as the downtown bars let out and one at 11:47 a.m. on Church Street. The rest were liquor violations and intoxicated-person calls, most of them downtown on School, Pine and Sacramento streets. The prior three weekends recorded four, five and eight alcohol calls, so Halloween landed at the high end of October's range without exceeding it. Across the full month, Lodi logged 20 DUI calls spread fairly evenly across the week; Tuesdays matched Saturdays.

The violent-category calls were four on Saturday and two on Sunday, none involving a gun being fired. Saturday's were a battery on South School Street at 5:21 a.m., a battery on South Fairmont Avenue at 1:09 p.m., and two brandishing calls, one on North Sacramento Street at 3:04 p.m. and one on Rivergate Place at 6:22 p.m. Two brandishings in a day is above the month's pace of three in 30 days. Sunday brought batteries on South Cherokee Lane at 12:17 p.m. and East Lockeford Street at 5:24 p.m.

The hours that produced the violence elsewhere were calm here. From midnight to 2 a.m. Sunday, the stretch after Halloween night, Lodi logged six calls: a juvenile call, four disturbances on South Hutchins, South Cherokee and South School streets, and the West Oak DUI. The Friday-into-Saturday overnight was busier, with a liquor violation, a disturbance and three suspicious-incident calls within a block of School Street, followed by five traffic stops in 45 minutes between 1:59 and 2:43 a.m. around School, Pine and Lodi Avenue, which reads as officers working the bar closing deliberately.

What did stand out in Lodi: Sunday burglaries

Sunday had eight serious-flagged calls, the most of any day in the weekend, and six were property crimes: burglaries on South Hutchins Street, South Pleasant Avenue, West Elm Street and South School Street, and stolen vehicles on Kirsten Drive and Dartmoor Circle. Four burglaries in one day is well above October's pace. It is unrelated to Halloween night but is the one line in the weekend's Lodi record that departs from the norm.

LodiEye is the original civic-reporting and analysis arm of Lodi411.com, a citizen-run civic data and transparency platform serving Lodi, California and San Joaquin County. LodiEye gathers information of public interest, applies editorial judgment to public records, meetings, and data, and publishes original explanatory reporting for its readers — the work of a newsroom, and a representative of the news media as that term is defined under federal law. Our reporting emphasizes primary sources, public data, and full source transparency so readers can check every claim. LodiEye complements, and does not replace, the other outlets covering this region; for additional reporting on Lodi, San Joaquin County, and the broader region, we also encourage readers to consult the Lodi News-Sentinel, Stocktonia, The Sacramento Bee, CalMatters, and other established news organizations. Our full editorial standards and news-media-status statement is published at lodi411.com/editorial-standards.

This LodiEye report was produced using artificial intelligence tools under the direction and review of the editor. Lodi411 uses multiple AI platforms in its research and publication workflow, including Anthropic's Claude and Perplexity AI, in the following ways:

Source Discovery

  • AI tools searched wire-service, local television and newspaper coverage of each weekend incident, prior-year Halloween weekend tallies from the Gun Violence Archive as reported in national outlets, local crime coverage for Dallas, Birmingham, Newark and Fairfield, Stocktonia and Bay Area television coverage of Stockton, and Lodi Police Department calls-for-service records published through Lodi411.

Credibility Validation

  • Casualty figures were cross-checked across the Associated Press, CNN, NBC and local outlets, and the differing 2023 tallies were reconciled by using the later published figures. Years without a located national tally were left blank rather than estimated.

Analysis and Synthesis

  • AI tools organized the incidents by city, compared the 2026 weekend with prior years, identified common elements across incidents, assembled the local crime context for each city from published reporting, and tallied Lodi calls for service by day, category and weekend against the prior three October weekends.

Presentation

  • AI tools drafted the article, built the comparison chart and table, and formatted the page for Lodi411.

Final Review

  • The editor reviewed the draft, the figures and the sources before publication. The 2026 figures are preliminary and may change as police release further information.

Lodi411 believes transparency about AI use serves its readers. Readers who spot errors are encouraged to write editor@lodi411.com so corrections can be made.

Sources

Don Bradford
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