Retired APD commander examines videos from fatal house party shooting

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The search for answers continues Tuesday after a deadly house party shooting over the weekend.

Albuquerque police say one person was killed and another four were injured Friday night.

Now, a new video is showing the chaos that erupted. In it, people can be seen running and hiding in front of a car while gunshots ring in the background.

APD is asking folks to submit more videos to help piece together what happened.

Neighbors described it as a war zone, and viewer videos tell a similar story.

“It’s a game changer the video is,” said retired APD Commander Paul Szych. 

Szych watched both videos sent into KOB 4’s newsroom and he says, despite only having 33 seconds of footage, there are still a lot of important details packed inside.

“From an evidentiary standpoint, you know, they say a picture says 1,000 words? Well, a video says a lot more than 1,000 words then,” Syzch said. 

His first takeaway is the size of the party.

“It’s a dense target. There’s a lot of people running, there’s people on the ground,” he said. “It’s a gathering, it’s a party that’s out of control, shots fired people down, it’s as serious as it gets.”

The other big reveal is more than one gun firing shots.

“There’s several people firing weapons in this video,” said Szych. “You not only have single fire, but you also have one weapon that’s firing what’s most likely to be fully automatic. And the delay would strongly indicate that the person either ran out of ammunition in one firearm and grabbed another or reloaded the firearm.”

Szych says there’s another huge clue in the second video – which is only 5-seconds long.

“You can distinctly hear around by being fired and flying through the air and making that whizzing sound. It shows that there’s firing that’s occurring in all different directions, indiscriminately,” he said. 

Szych says videos like this – no matter how short – can provide crucial evidence for detectives to piece together what happened.

“Don’t think your video is not the important one and don’t be the one to make that determination,” Szych said. “You never know if your second or two or five seconds or 10 seconds of video from another angle from another device, is the definitive piece of evidence that law enforcement needs to piece together the puzzle.”

But despite the benefits, Szych says it is never worth it to try to film an active gunfight even if you think you’re safe.

“You can’t sometimes get out once those rounds start to fire – to be fired and what happens once that starts, that’s the difference between life and death. And what happens once that starts, is the difference of somebody’s family mourning over a death for the rest of their life,” said Szych. 

Albuquerque Police is still searching for more videos of this incident. Witnesses can upload videos related to the shooting to this link.