A 15-year-old Newark boy is dead and at least 11 others injured in two separate shootings within four hours Monday night in Brick City.

Officials with the Essex County Prosecutor's Office say Aziz Stewart, 15, of Newark, was one of eight shot shortly before 10 p.m. on Scheerer Avenue in the city's South Ward. He died later at University Hospital. The other three were injured. Their names, ages and genders were not released. Four hours earlier, a shooting on Halsey Street in the city's downtown sent three men and one woman to University Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. Their names and ages were not released.

The shootings come roughly one week after and roughly a month after crime reduction program. So far this summer, there have been five murders in June and four in July, not including Monday's homicide, according to DeMaio. In May, the city witnessed at least four murders, including the.

At the scene Monday on Scheerer Avenue, witnesses told Patch they heard several gunshots and saw a dark-colored SUV flee the area shortly before 10 p.m. Tom Zhu, who works at Fong's Chinese Restaurant on Bergen Street, around the corner from the shooting, said he was tending to customers when he heard several "bangs." He said he at first thought the noises were fireworks until police arrived.

In the downtown incident, police responded to the corner of Halsey Street and Branford Place shortly before 6 p.m. after receiving calls of "a male shot," according to Newark Detective Hubert Henderson. Upon arrival, officers found a man with a gunshot wound to the leg. He was transported to University Hospital.

Henderson said police later learned that three other people, two men and one woman, already were at University Hospital for gunshot wounds allegedly sustained while on Halsey Street. He said the woman was shot in the hand, but did not know where the other two men had been wounded.