Devine Carama, director of the city's ONE Lexington gun violence prevention office, addressed the community directly for the first time Tuesday since a string of seven unrelated shootings left nine people wounded over four days — a stretch he called unlike anything he has seen in the city.

"I've been in Lexington a long time. I've never seen anything like this," Carama said in an 11-minute video posted to his Facebook page Tuesday morning. "We've seen retaliatory violence, we've seen different crews shooting it out over the course of a weekend, but we've never seen anything like this — from racial demographic, to age, to location, from domestic violence to outside of a party."

The shootings began Friday night in the Winter Garden area and continued through the weekend: Pimlico Parkway on Saturday afternoon, Hollow Creek Road late Saturday night, Oxford Circle and a second incident early Sunday morning, and a shooting at a Newtown Court hotel early Monday. By Tuesday, Carama's count had grown to seven incidents and nine victims in four days. None of the shootings has been fatal, but at least one victim initially suffered life-threatening injuries.

WKYT reported the Friday-through-Sunday stretch alone — five shootings with six people hurt — was Lexington's second most violent weekend for nonfatal shootings since 2021, behind only an August 2022 weekend that left eight people wounded.

'I wanted to leave space'

Carama, whose office sits inside Mayor Linda Gorton's administration, said he stayed quiet through the weekend deliberately, deferring to the mayor and to Assistant Police Chief Bryan Maynard, who both addressed the violence publicly.

"I wanted to give her the respect and the space to step out there and make her statements and to be seen and to address this issue as the leader of our city," he said. "There's times for me to get out there and speak, but there's times for me to be quiet."

But he said silence had its limits: "I can't be on the news talking about this streak of no homicides, I can't be on the news talking about all of these incredible programs that we're doing, all of the great progress that we've seen over the last four years — and then when we have a bad weekend, I go silent."

Gorton said Sunday she was "committed to Lexington being a safe city" and would "not accept this violence as a normal occurrence." Maynard called the burst of unrelated shootings "pretty unprecedented for our community."

No change in strategy

Carama's central message was that the office will not overhaul its approach in response to one violent stretch — and he pushed back on calls to do so.

"When you have built a community-based, community-driven, community-focused strategy that has been working for four years, you just don't abandon that strategy because you had a bad weekend," he said. "If you're looking for ONE Lexington to come and do something intentionally different or make a major shift in our strategy, it's not going to happen."

He acknowledged the criticism that flooded in over the weekend — including, he said, people calling him a racist and saying "the mayor need to quit hiring a rapper." Carama, a hip-hop artist and longtime community activist, has led ONE Lexington since 2021.

"Every time things get bad — when things are good and going very well, a lot of people are quiet. But as soon as we have a rough patch, here come all the think tanks," he said. "We need to stay vigilant, but we can't panic."

He also echoed a point Maynard made: the majority of Lexington's gun violence is interpersonal, meaning suspect and victim know each other. "It's not really a city where you just see a bunch of random shootings," Carama said, adding that there is no ongoing feud behind the weekend's violence and no indication of a continuing threat.

Police have made arrests in most of the incidents — suspects had been charged in four of the six shootings reported through Monday. Once cases reach that stage, Carama said, ONE Lexington steps back: "We allow the justice system and the police to do what they do."

The numbers behind the spike

The violent stretch interrupted what had been Lexington's best run in years. Through last week, the city had recorded 28 shooting victims in 2026 — fewer than at the same point in any of the previous four years, and down from 52 at this point in 2023. Lexington has had four homicides this year, compared with 13 at the same point last year; the city's last homicide was Feb. 5, a streak of more than 170 days that ONE Lexington publicly celebrated at the 150-day mark in early July.

Carama said his office's crisis outreach advocates and community partners are contacting victims and families from the weekend, and he urged residents affected by gun violence — recent or past — to reach out for support.

Looking ahead, he pointed to domestic and interpersonal violence as the front the community most needs to work: he said ONE Lexington is connecting residents of an apartment complex that has seen domestic-violence-related shootings with Green Dot bystander-intervention training, and he named GreenHouse17 among the partners offering that work.

He closed with a plea to keep the violence from curdling into division in an election season: "Weekends like this can really tear a city apart, especially in this political environment that we're in on a national level that tends to trickle down to the local level. But don't let it tear us apart... We're at our best when we're working together."