[STLTODAY] The same scenes play out time and again for police Lt. Scott Aubuchon’s homicide detectives when they arrive to investigate another death in the city: yellow police tape, the wails of family and evidence technicians scouring for bullet casings.Aubuchon’s team is struggling to keep up as the city contends with a homicide rate that, by year’s end, likely will be the worst in at least a half-century.
The number of killings soared over the summer as detectives were called to 114 homicides in June, July and August. There were 53 people killed in the city in July alone.
"Since June 1, our numbers began to rise at the alarming rate," said Aubuchon, the homicide unit’s commander since 2018. "We’ve never seen anything like the last three months. These are indescribable times."
The same can be said for the year.
The shooting death last Monday of a 15-year-old girl in the Riverview neighborhood was the 194th homicide of the year, matching the city’s total for all of 2019. That number has since been surpassed. If the pace of killings continues, St. Louis will reach an ignoble milestone. Over the past decade, the city has averaged 50 homicides in the last four months of the year, according to police statistics. If that holds true, St. Louis will see about 240 homicides in 2020, the highest in 25 years.
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