A man has been arrested in the US on suspicion of shooting a six-year-old girl and her parents after children went to retrieve a basketball from his yard.
Robert Louis Singletary, 24, was arrested in Tampa, Florida, on a fugitive warrant on Thursday according to jail records.
Kinsley White, six, was grazed by a bullet on the left cheek in the shooting that happened in North Carolina on Tuesday, but later released from hospital.
Kinsley’s father Jamie White, who was shot in the back after running to her aid, suffered liver damage according to the girl’s grandfather Carl Hilderbrand, while authorities said shots missed another man.
Kinsley’s mother also sustained a graze to the elbow.
Neighbour Jonathan Robertson said the attack happened after children went to retrieve a basketball from Singletary’s yard.
He said Singletary, who had yelled at the children on several occasions, went inside his home and returned with a gun before he started shooting.
“As soon as I saw him coming out shooting, I was hollering at everybody to get down and get inside,” said Mr Robertson.
Singletary had been wanted on four counts of attempted murder, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm, following the incident near Gastonia, North Carolina, on Tuesday.
Authorities said that when the shooting happened, he had been out on bond relating to a December assault on a woman with a hammer.
Kinsley’s mother described the incident as “very scary”.
“My daughter actually got to come home last night,” she said. “She just had a bullet fragment in her cheek.”
It is the latest in a number of shootings that have occurred in the US for apparently trivial reasons, including the wounding of Black teenager Ralph Yarl in Missouri who went to the wrong address to pick up his younger brothers, the killing of a woman in a car that pulled into the wrong upstate New York driveway and the wounding of two Texas cheerleaders after one apparently mistakenly got into a car that she thought was her own.
