Federal agency joins investigation into Rochester mass shooting, offers reward for leads

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the mass shooting at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park on Sunday morning.

News10NBC’s Hailie Higgins sat down with police and a representative from the ATF unit Wednesday afternoon. The ATF is a federal agency funding this reward.

The ATF tells Hailie it works with the Rochester Police Department on nearly every shooting in the city. That’s because it’s part of Rochester’s multi-agency Violent Crime Task Force.

ATF agents help with ballistics forensics, and did so in the shooting at MLK Park Sunday morning. Investigators collect bullet casings and run them through a ballistic database to check if it matches any other shootings.

The ATF also occasionally issues rewards. Because this was a mass shooting, and because there were a lot of witnesses in that crowd, agents said they decided to use this investigative strategy to look for leads.

“Six people were injured by a shooting incident. We want to make sure that we’re out there, we want to make sure the community knows that our task force is working hard along with the Rochester Police Department to find out who could have done something like this. We’re the federal agency for violent crime,” an ATF representative said.

“It’s easy for me to get up here, and it’s easy for any police officer to get up here and say ‘This is unacceptable’ or any politician to get up. The mayor was here Sunday night saying ‘This is unacceptable.’ We need people that were there to also say ‘This is unacceptable’ and tell us what occurred, and hopefully something like the $5,000 reward will spur them to do it,” a Rochester Police Department representative said.

Rochester Police also say it’s not just people who were at the park who might know what happened. They’re also looking to hear from folks who may have information through word of mouth.

In New York State, they’ve offered at least one reward every year for the past few years. Here in Rochester, the most recent ones were in 2020. One was for a man accused of assaulting an on-duty firefighter. The other was for a 16-person shooting.

A.I. assisted with the formatting of this story. Click here to see how WHEC News 10 uses A.I.