# Second Pool Hall Mass Shooting in Santo Domingo Leaves Seven Dead Amid Ecuador Gang Conflict
*Event date: September 13, 2025*
By IO Digest Desk
A pool hall in Santo Domingo, Ecuador, was hit by a deadly gang attack on September 13, 2025, leaving at least seven people dead and several others wounded in what police described as another episode in the country's widening organized-crime violence.
AP reported that the shooting took place late Friday in Santo Domingo de los Tsachilas, about 130 kilometers west of Quito. Local police commander Col. Olga Benavides said the attack was linked to a territorial dispute between criminal gangs. According to AP, four other people were wounded. The agency said it was the second assault of its kind in less than a month in the same city, after another pool hall attack on August 17 also left seven people dead.
The supplied CBS report broadly matches the account of a coordinated strike by armed men, though it describes police announcing the toll on Sunday and presents the video circulating online as unverified footage. AP's excerpt adds the clearest local law-enforcement detail: several men dressed in black, wearing vests and caps, arrived at the venue and opened fire before the vehicle allegedly used in the attack was later found burned elsewhere in the city.
The immediate facts point to a targeted mass shooting rather than an indiscriminate public attack without criminal context. AP said one of the dead and two of the wounded had criminal records for offenses including drug trafficking, criminal association, murder and theft. That does not explain why every victim was shot, but it supports the police assessment that the violence emerged from gang rivalries rather than a random dispute at the venue.
The larger setting is an Ecuador still failing to contain a rapid escalation in cartel-linked violence. AP said more than 5,500 homicides were recorded nationally between January and July, sharply above the same period a year earlier. CBS described Ecuador as a country plunged into crisis after transnational cartels expanded operations through its ports and trafficking routes, with the government repeatedly imposing emergency measures but seeing little reduction in violence.
The attack's location matters as well. Santo Domingo sits along important internal transit corridors, and AP described the city as being in the grip of repeated gang assaults. The fact that two nearly identical attacks struck pool halls in the same city within weeks suggests not only instability but also a willingness by armed groups to attack social venues where bystanders are likely to be present. CBS noted that another massacre earlier in the year at a cockfighting ring underscored the same pattern of heavily armed attacks on gathering places.
Still, the supplied evidence leaves limits. It does not identify the attackers, assign the shooting to a named organization or establish whether any arrests were made on the event date. The circulated security footage mentioned by CBS had not been independently verified, and there is no basis in the excerpts for extending the narrative beyond the police account of a gang-related territorial dispute.
What can be said with confidence is that on September 13, 2025, gunmen attacked a pool hall in Santo Domingo, killing at least seven people and injuring others in the city's second such massacre in under a month. The repetition of the method, the venue and the city highlighted how normalized mass public violence had become in parts of Ecuador despite military deployments, emergency decrees and promises of a tougher crackdown.
