Illinois State Police arrested two teenagers on Sunday in connection with a mass shooting that killed five members of one family in East St. Louis and wounded two others. ISP Director Brendan Kelly announced the arrests at a Sunday news conference, saying the suspects were taken into custody at Holten State Park, a recreation area east of the city The Guardian.

The dead were identified as Cherie L. May, 49; Devin D. May, 24; Patricia A. May, 74; Quentin L. Thompson, 21; and Shania W. Thompson, 25 The Guardian. The two wounded survivors were taken to a hospital across the river in St. Louis, Missouri. Kelly said no bystanders were struck, a detail that matters given the shootings unfolded across three separate locations around East St. Louis rather than a single scene — a pattern investigators and outlets including KSDK have characterized as a targeted attack on the family rather than an indiscriminate one KSDK.

At least one of the two arrested teenagers is related to at least one of the victims, according to Kelly's briefing The Guardian. Neither suspect had been formally charged as of Sunday's news conference. Illinois State Police said they are working with the St. Clair County State's Attorney's Office to seek charges Audacy/WBBM, a standard sequencing in Illinois cases where felony review by the prosecutor's office follows an arrest before charges are formally lodged — a gap that can stretch from hours to days depending on the complexity of the evidence being assembled.

The multi-site nature of the attack — three distinct locations rather than one — is the detail likely to shape how prosecutors eventually frame intent. A shooting confined to a single address more easily supports a theory of a single violent episode; a sequence spread across three sites suggests premeditation and movement between targets, which carries different weight for charges ranging from first-degree murder to potential enhancements tied to multiple victims or locations. St. Clair County prosecutors will need to establish not just who pulled triggers but how the sequence of locations maps onto the relationships among victims and suspects, particularly given the familial link Kelly disclosed.

Family-on-family mass shootings of this scale are statistically rare relative to the broader category of U.S. mass shootings, most of which involve either domestic-violence dynamics confined to a single household or shooters with no kinship tie to victims. Five fatalities within one extended family, distributed across three locations, sits closer to the profile of a targeted retaliatory or dispute-driven killing than a spontaneous domestic incident — though ISP has not publicly detailed a motive, and Kelly's remarks Sunday were notably restrained on that point.

The case drew national wire coverage quickly. Reuters filed on the shooting the day it occurred Yahoo/Reuters, and the New York Times published same-day as well NYT. St. Louis Public Radio's initial report on July 12 cited five dead and two injured, matching the toll Kelly confirmed the following day STLPR, and asked the public to route tips to a dedicated ISP line, 618-571-4124 STL Public Radio Facebook.

Notably, the video recording of Kelly's Sunday news conference, initially posted to Facebook Live, is no longer publicly accessible; the platform listing indicates it was either deleted, made private, or had its sharing settings altered. That leaves reporters and researchers reliant on secondhand accounts of exactly what Kelly said, rather than the primary recording — a reminder of how quickly official real-time video can become unreliable as an archival source, even for a case this prominent.

What happens next runs through St. Clair County. Given the ages of the suspects — both identified as teenagers, though ISP has not released their exact ages or names publicly — any prosecution will likely trigger questions about whether they are charged as adults, a determination Illinois law leaves to prosecutorial discretion above certain age thresholds for the most serious violent offenses. The family relationship between at least one suspect and a victim will also likely factor into bail arguments and, eventually, into how a jury is asked to understand motive. For now, the public record is limited to Kelly's Sunday statements and the toll he confirmed: five members of one family dead, two wounded, and two teenagers in custody without formal charges.