The shots were fired only a day after a glowing Wall Street Journal report on the city hit the internet.
Some 24 hours after the storied newspaper’s report talked about how Chattanooga had bucked a United States trend on declining population among cities our size, about the city’s vaunted internet speeds and about the city benefiting from the tech trend, six teenagers were shot between Cherry and Walnut streets, near the Walnut Street Bridge and only blocks from the Tennessee Aquarium.
The incident – which also made national news – followed a series of shootings in October in which four were shot and three died, and a mass shooting in September that left two dead and five people (including a 14-year-old) injured.
But none of that was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal.
“Weirdly, the pandemic had this silver lining for us,” Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly, who was photographed in the Journal’s newsroom, said in the article. “The city kind of fell upwards.”