Less than 48 hours af­ter a dri­ve-by shoot­ing in Mal­oney where three peo­ple were wound­ed, po­lice and fire of­fi­cers were called to a fire at an apart­ment near the build­ing where the shoot­ing hap­pened.

Po­lice are yet to de­ter­mine a mo­tive for the dri­ve-by shoot­ing, but strong­ly be­lieve that it is gang-re­lat­ed. Of­fi­cers are al­so say­ing that the fire was a sus­pect­ed ar­son and could be linked to the dri­ve-by shoot­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to a po­lice re­port, short­ly af­ter 4 am on Tues­day fire and smoke was seen com­ing from apart­ment 2-1 at Build­ing 15.

Fire of­fi­cers from the Tu­na­puna Fire Sta­tion re­spond­ed and were able to con­tain the blaze and ex­tin­guish it in time be­fore it spread to ad­ja­cent units. This was in part due to the fact that a fire of­fi­cer liv­ing in the com­mu­ni­ty al­so re­spond­ed to the fire and did some ini­tial work on his own to con­tain the blaze. Fire of­fi­cers al­so thanked res­i­dents for think­ing and act­ing quick­ly along­side the fire of­fi­cer in form­ing a buck­et brigade in the in­ter­im as they wait­ed for them to ar­rive.

Po­lice said the own­er of the apart­ment was not at home at the time of the in­ci­dent.

In­ves­ti­ga­tions are con­tin­u­ing. - Rhon­dor Dowlat