MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Police are still hunting for the man who pulled the trigger in a shooting behind a Beale Street business.
Police say the suspect is an employee at BB Kings, but they have not released his name.
Sources said the victim, who is expected to be okay, was a Beale Street Flipper.
However, Paul Morris, President of the Downtown Commission was bound and determined to make sure this was not labeled as a Beale Street crime.
He has been tweeting about the incident ever since it happened insisting it did not happen on Beale.
Some, however, said he was splitting hairs.
“Things happen all the time, but you shouldn’t get frightened,” one woman, who was visiting Memphis from New Orleans, said.
People said the weekend shooting behind Flynn’s on Beale would not stop them from visiting Memphis’s iconic street.
“It’s not going to scare us away,” a couple from Cleveland said.
Morris took to Twitter to bash media reports of the incident that tied it to Beale Street.
“There wasn’t violence on Beale St. itself, and I don’t want those people who come on Beale to have false information,” he said.
Some said arguing over whether the alley behind Beale should be considered part of Beale seems trivial, especially in the context of a shooting that left one of the famous Beale Street Flippers injured.
“Is it splitting hairs when it’s this close to Beale?” WREG reporter Katie Rufener asked Morris.
“It isn’t splitting hairs,” he said. “I think if you’re in the journalism business it’s important to get accuracy and precision correct.”
A police report listed Beale as the place of the crime, because that was where the victim was found.
Mayor A C Wharton said it did not matter where the crime happened.
It just mattered that it happened.
“This was not some stranger danger, somebody randomly attacking someone. I think there’s a bit more to it than what’s been reported so far,” he said.
As it turned out, crime has been down on Beale Street.
So far this year, it has gone down 18%.
However when it came to violent crime, the numbers were about the same and included several high-profile shootings in the past two years.
