Butler police are investigating a pre-dawn shooting call Monday in the area of Mitchell Avenue and State Street, according to neighbors.

Police have declined to comment, but at about noon, three marked city cruisers were still parked in the neighborhood where officers were reportedly investigating and questioning residents about what they saw or heard.

The county's Emergency Services Unit (ESU) also was activated to assist city police, authorities said.

Several neighbors, most of whom did not want to give their names, told the Butler Eagle they heard between four and six gunshots around 4 a.m.

Darren Verber, who lives with his fiancée on the 300 block of Mitchell Avenue, said he heard and later saw an unknown man firing a handgun.

“At least six shots,” Verber said he counted. He described the shots as being fired in succession.

“It was pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,” he said.

Verber said he was in the bathroom when he heard the gunfire.

“I heard the first two and came out, and they continued,” he recounted. “I looked out the window and actually saw the gun firing, the guy shooting.”

It was too dark to identify the kind of gun or the man firing it, Verber said. But he could see the man holding the gun in his right hand in and around the intersection of Mitchell Avenue and State Street.

“I just saw the (gun) flashes,” he said.

The man, Verber said, appeared to be shooting in the direction of the house where Verber has lived for nearly four years. But he said that he and his fiancée believed the man firing the gun was shooting at a dark car, possibly a sedan, traveling on Mitchell Avenue toward Brady Street.

His fiancée, he said, “heard the car get hit. She heard glass shattering.”

Verber said that he and his fiancée later went to the police station and provided statements to investigators.

A woman who lives on the same block of Mitchell Avenue said she heard the shots. “I'd say four to six,” she said.

“The first two woke me up and, when I got to my window, somebody was already running down that way,” she said, pointing away from her house.

She said police later came to her home to question her, but she could not provide much more information.

A man on State Street near Mitchell Avenue remembered hearing about four shots, fired consecutively. Moments earlier, he said, he had been sleeping.

He said he looked out his window but didn't see anything. He added that after about five minutes he saw “the police lights all shining around.”

He said he didn't call 911 immediately because he wasn't certain what he heard.

“I thought it was a car backfiring,” he said. “When you're sleeping, you don't really think about it. This is a quiet street.”

The man, who has lived there since October, also recounted that around 7 a.m., he saw what he described as “a SWAT team” take a man out of a nearby house on State Street in handcuffs.

The neighbor said he did not know the man, but he had seen him at the house before.

Around the same time that the neighbor recalled seeing officers enter the house and subsequently remove the man, the county's ESU was activated, said 911 coordinator Rob McLafferty.

The ESU, which is similar to a SWAT team, is composed of municipal police officers. It was formed in 2017 to assist local police departments responding to high-risk situations.

But it was not immediately clear what the unit's role was in Monday's incident.

“(ESU) was staged for the city of Butler police,” McLafferty said, but he declined further comment.

Verber, meanwhile, said he wasn't scared by the shooting, but it bothered him. “I was upset,” he said, “cause things like that aren't supposed to happen.”