(BATH TOWNSHIP, Ohio) — “We are heartbroken by this senseless act of gun violence, and our thoughts are with the injured victims and all those affected by it,” Airbnb said in a statement to ABC News on Sunday afternoon. “Unauthorized and disruptive gatherings are strictly prohibited on Airbnb and our Safety team acted immediately to remove the account of the individual who deliberately broke those rules by booking this stay.”
“Our law enforcement response team is in contact with the chief of Bath Township Police Department to assist their ongoing investigation to ensure those responsible for this terrible incident are brought to justice,” the statement concluded.
Sinopoli said that Sunday’s incident marked the second time since July 2017 that a shooting had occurred at an Airbnb rental property in Bath Township. He said that in the previous incident, a man was shot in the leg. That incident involved an apparent drive-by shooting at a party, according to the Akron Beacon Journal.
The Sunday shooting came just days after Airbnb announced that it was deploying what it called AI “anti-party” technology across the United States and Canada to help mitigate Halloween-night gatherings.
The company said it is using machine learning to block bookings that show a potential of party risks, “such as the length of the reservation, the distance of the listing from the guest’s location, property type, and timing of the booking, including last-minute requests.”
This is the fifth year that Airbnb has instituted anti-Halloween party protections, which prohibited 38,000 people from booking houses in the U.S. and 6,300 in Canada last year, according to the company.
Airbnb issued a permanent global party ban in 2022 following multiple shooting incidents.
“Strong policies must be complemented by strong enforcement,” the company said at the time. “We’ve introduced a number of anti-party measures in recent years to enforce our policy and try, to the best of our ability, to stop both unauthorized parties and chronic party houses.”
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