Multiple people shot at Seattle Center during Bite of Seattle festival

Multiple people were shot Sunday night at Seattle Center during the Bite of Seattle festival, and Seattle police told people to avoid the area as more information was coming. The shooting hit one of Seattle’s busiest summer gathering spots, a block from the Space Needle.

The Bite of Seattle had been scheduled for July 24-26, 2026, at Seattle Center, with free admission and festival hours from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. The event was billed for its 38th year and was set to feature more than 60 restaurants, food trucks, artisan and specialty food vendors, along with food, beverages and entertainment.

Seattle Center is a major event campus that includes Climate Pledge Arena and McCaw Hall, and its location near the Space Needle makes any emergency there highly visible across downtown Seattle. The campus’s mix of large venues and open pedestrian space helped explain the fast public warning and the immediate focus on the area.

The shooting set up immediate scrutiny of security planning for Seattle Center’s large summer festivals, where open-air food events, arena traffic and heavy foot traffic overlap. Any review will focus on crowd control, police staging, emergency routing and how quickly visitors can be pushed clear of a rapidly changing crime scene.