INTERNATIONAL: Two adults were critically wounded and a child suffered a minor injury in a shooting on Friday (April 22) near a college preparatory school in Washington, D.C., and police swarmed the area searching for suspects, authorities said.

Details of the shooting were sketchy. No motive was known for the shooting, which erupted in late afternoon in an upscale neighborhood of Northwest Washington along Connecticut Avenue, a major thoroughfare through the city.

Two of the victims, a man and a woman found wounded near the Edmund Burke School, a private preparatory academy, were hospitalized in critical but stable condition, and a juvenile victim suffered a minor gunshot wound, according to Assistant Police Chief Stuart Emerman.

He said police fanned out across the neighborhood looking for possible perpetrators, but had no immediate description of any suspect. Emerman said several individuals seen fleeing the scene were briefly detained for questioning but none were believed to have been involved.

"We're looking for any suspect or suspects," Emerman told reporters. "We do not know the full details of what took place. But we continue to ask the public to just steer clear of the area as we continue to investigate."

One eyewitness told local television station WUSA-TV he heard a burst of rapid gunfire lasting about a minute, and saw a woman running out of a building who appeared to have been grazed by a gunshot, followed by other individuals who were apparently wounded.

The eyewitness said he saw other people on the street taking cover behind parked cars and pointing up to a balcony where they presumably believed the gunshots originated.

According to the District of Columbia's Metropolitan Police Department, the shooting unfolded in the 4100 block of Connecticut Avenue in the city's northwest quadrant near the Burke School.

Dozens of police vehicles, with flashing lights, were parked outside the school building, as police in full tactical gear and some in camouflage assembled nearby.

The upscale neighborhood also is home to several foreign embassies, Howard University School of Law, and the Van Ness campus of the University of the District of Columbia, which said on Twitter that it had been placed on a security lockdown.

A second well-known prep school, the Sidwell Friends School, also was reported by local media to be on lockdown.