Chicago ? Authorities found the bodies of five young people Wednesday inside a ransacked house on Chicago’s South Side, raising the body count in an already violent spring, police said.

It appeared the three men and two women had been shot, but investigators were waiting for the Cook County medical examiner’s office to confirm a cause of death, said Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrne. Autopsies were scheduled for today, the medical examiner’s office said.

“This is very serious,” Byrne said at a news conference near the two-story house. “There’s five victims. There’s five families right now that are grieving over this.”

All the victims were in their 20s, and they all knew each other, said Deputy Chief Eugene Williams. There were signs of forced entry into the house, which appeared to have been ransacked, Williams said.