Police have arrested a man accused of shooting a 6-year-old and her parents after a basketball rolled into his yard.
North Carolina authorities say 24-year-old Robert Louis Singletary surrendered to police in Florida. He faces multiple felonies.
Neighbors say the whole thing started when Singletary yelled at some neighborhood kids who were trying to retrieve their basketball. One kid told his dad, and the dad confronted Singletary.
Singletary reportedly went back inside and came out shooting.
Kinsley, the 6-year-old, described to WBTV her understanding of what had happened.
“I couldn’t get inside in time so he shot my daddy in the back,” she told a reporter.
The girl’s mother, Ashley Hilderbrand, told CNN that medical personnel had removed bullet fragments from her daughter’s cheek. She noted that her own elbow had been grazed by a bullet.
Her family, she said, had nothing to do with the basketball game. Her child was riding her bike, and the parents were cooking on the grill.
That same day, a cheerleader in Texas set off a round of gunfire by getting into the wrong car.
Heather Roth said she was part of a team of cheerleaders returning from training camp. They had carpooled to the event and were returning to a supermarket parking lot to retrieve their cars.
Roth had climbed into what she thought was her car when she noticed a stranger in the passenger seat. She was trying to apologize for her mistake when the man produced a gun and started shooting, grazing her and critically wounding a teammate, 18-year-old Payton Washington.
The shooter, 25-yearold Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr., has been charged with engaging in deadly conduct, a third-degree felony.
Days earlier, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis died in upstate New York when she and a group of friends picked the wrong driveway.
Sixty-five-year-old Kevin Monahan faces a charge of second-degree murder. His attorney, Kurt Mausert, said Monahan had been frightened.
He said Monahan didn’t know his bullet had struck anyone until police showed up to make the arrest.
Meanwhile, in Missouri, 16-year-old Ralph Yarl walked up to the wrong door and was shot twice, once in the head. Miraculously, he survived.
Eighty-four-year-old Andrew Lester told police he was “scared to death” when he saw Yarl on his porch. He told police he thought the teenager was about to break in.
As Yarl got up to run away, he heard the old man yell, “Don’t come around here.”
As of Friday, the Gun Violence Archive had recorded nearly 13,000 gun deaths in the United States so far this year. Some were accidental. More than 7,000 were suicides.
Counted among the dead were 77 children and 453 teenagers.
The Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based research project, found that as of 2018, there were about 390 million guns in circulation in the United States. That’s more than one firearm for every man, woman and child in the country.
Many Americans say they buy guns to keep themselves and their families safe. Is it working?
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