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The gunman who killed 6 people at an Illinois Fourth of July parade opened fire from a nearby rooftop, police said

Police search an area after gunfire erupted at a Fourth of July parade route in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, U.S. July 4, 2022 in a still image from video.
Police search an area after gunfire erupted at a Fourth of July parade route in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, July 4, 2022 in a still image from video. ABC affiliate WLS/ABC7 via REUTERS
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A gunman opened fire from a rooftop onto a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, on Monday morning, police said.

After the shooting that killed six people and sent another 31 to the hospital, multiple witnesses told local news broadcaster WGN that they saw the shooter on the rooftop of a nearby business.

Local police officials confirmed those reports at a press conference Monday afternoon.

"It does appear that he was shooting from a roof. The roof that he was shooting from — I don't have that information right now," Chris Covelli, the public information officer for the Lake County Sheriff's Office, told reporters.

Police said the suspected shooter has not yet been identified or detained, though a rifle was recovered from the scene. Authorities described the suspect as a white man between 18 and 20 years old with long dark hair, a small build, and wearing a white or blue t-shirt.

empty lawn chairs and blankets with cooler in grass beside street
Portable chairs are left behind after gunfire erupted at a Fourth of July parade route in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, July 4, 2022.  Max Herman/Reuters

"We would still consider him to be armed and dangerous," Covelli said, encouraging everyone in town to stay indoors.

The FBI is helping to investigate and search for the suspect, police. The bureau requested that anybody with video of the area contact them to share the footage by contacting investigators at 1-800-CALL-FBI.

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Morgan McFall-Johnsen was a science reporter at Business Insider. She covered climate change, weather, Earth sciences, and space, as well as health and medicine, environmental issues, and occasionally archaeology.Email her at mmcfalljohnsen@gmail.com and follow her on X @MorganMJohnsen.Expertise
  • Climate change and climate-crisis solutions
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  • Commercial space industry (SpaceX, Blue Origin, satellite constellations)
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Morgan has interviewed astronauts aboard the International Space Station and published exclusive in-depth accounts of early COVID-19 outbreaks on cruise ships.She has appeared on NBC, Scripps News, Sirius XM, C-SPAN, and NPR to discuss climate change, extreme weather, Mars missions, the space race, and far-right extremism. She’s previously written for Backpacker Magazine, Outside Business Journal (formerly SNEWS), and Popular Science.She holds a Bachelor of Science in Journalism from Northwestern University, where she also studied environmental policy and French. She was a 2022 Logan Science Journalism Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory and a 2023 Columbia Energy Journalism Fellow.Popular stories