After Splash Park Shooting, Michigan Community Feels a Familiar Pain

One day after a shooting in a splash park in suburban Detroit injured nine people, including children, residents on Sunday were struggling to process what happened, with bafflement, fear and shock.

“It was hard to go to sleep last night. It’s hard to function this morning,” said Alex Roser, a 33-year-old pharmacy technician who said he grew up in the area.

On Saturday afternoon, a gunman opened fire at a splash pad — a play area for children with blue cylinders that spray water — in Rochester Hills. The police identified the shooter as Michael William Nash, 42, and said that the handgun recovered at the scene was legally purchased in 2015 and registered to him.

Authorities said that a motive was not yet known but that the attack appeared to be random. Mr. Nash was found dead with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound later on Saturday in his home nearby, they said.

The wounded included an 8-year-old boy, a 4-year-old boy and their 39-year-old mother, authorities said. Others at the park that day were a city employee and 14 of his friends and family members. The city employee’s wife was shot, Mayor Bryan Barnett of Rochester Hills said Sunday. He added that two of the victims were in critical condition, while the others were stable.

As the community reeled, it was not lost on residents that this was the second shooting in the area in recent years: In 2021 at Oxford High School in the same county, a student fatally shot four of his classmates and injured seven others. And many were horrified that this time it happened so close to their home, in a city that promotes itself on its website as one of the safest in America.