Unspoken rules and social convention once kept the gunfire out of churches, and street criminals would often show deference to the very old and very young. But recent shootings suggest a change.

Take off your hood in a house of God. Many thought that on Sunday afternoon, when three men in dark sweatshirts strode into a packed New Gethsemane Church of God in Christ in Richmond, CA. They wandered the aisles, apparently looking for someone.

When they found them, shots rang out.

“People were mostly cooperative. But most of them were facing forward,” Detective Sgt. Lee Hendricsen said, one day after the gunmen sent a 14-year-old boy and a 19-year-old man to the hospital with bullet wounds.

The attack followed last week’s shooting death of a pregnant woman in the street in front of her family’s home; a likely extension of hostilities between neighborhoods that flared anew with the shooting death of a man in a San Francisco night club two weeks ago, police said.

The victim, 19-year-old Lawon Hall, had ties to a south Richmond group often in the mix with neighborhood street crime, police say. But whether his death relates to other recent shootings in Richmond remains a puzzle for detectives.

Sunday’s shooting, inside a church at the corner of 21st Street and Roosevelt Avenue during midday service, remains a mystery to police and community alike.

To read more, click here.