YOUNGSTOWN — A shooting took place on North Evanston Avenue on the West Side on Monday evening that occurred about six minutes and 1.5 miles away from an assault at Mahoning Avenue and Oakhill Avenue downtown.

Youngstown police are investigating the possibility that the two were connected.

The shooting was reported at 6:16 p.m. on North Evanston Avenue. When officers arrived, they spoke to the victim’s mother, who said her son had been injured and was taken to the hospital.

During the investigation, officers found three spent bullet shell casings of the same caliber. They were collected as evidence, the report states.

Crime scene investigators and detectives were called out to investigate.

SIX MINUTES EARLIER

At 6:10 p.m., officers were called to Mahoning Avenue at Oakhill Avenue, about 1.5 miles away from the later shooting, for an attack of a male at that corner after he walked there from the Western Reserve Transit Authority bus station downtown.

The victim said he noticed that three or four other males were walking behind him as he was walking across the Spring Common Bridge near the WRTA, but he did not think anything of it.

But when he got close to the Mahoning-Oak Hill Avenue, the males ran up, hit him in the back of the head and started to “jump” him, a police report states. They were wearing ski masks, he said.

While the males were hitting him, the victim felt his pockets to find things to steal, but all he had was a phone and a black computer-like bag, and they did not take those, he said.

He said he feels the attack was aimed at stealing from him. He said when they left, it appeared that they went to catch a bus. He did not know where the bus was heading because he was “disoriented” because of blows to the head, he said.

The victim had cuts, bruises and blood dripping down from his head, so an officer called for an ambulance and notified his supervisor of the assault because of “another robbery that happened shortly after” the assault at Oakhill and Mahoning avenues.

The shooting happened “in a similar way but that (it) involved a shooting a few streets up,” the report states.

Capt. Jason Simon, head of the detective division of the Youngstown Police Department, said late Tuesday that investigators “at this point … cannot say for certain” whether the two crimes are related, but the department is “investigating the possibility that they may be related and have suspects in common.”