A six-year-old girl and her parents were allegedly shot by a neighbor after a basketball that the child was playing with rolled into the attacker’s yard, according to authorities and local media reporting.
The shooting occurred on Wednesday in North Carolina when several young children were playing with a basketball which rolled into the yard of Robert Singletary, the news outlet WSOC-TV reported. Online court records show Singletary was arrested Thursday afternoon near Tampa. He is scheduled to appear in court on Friday.
It continued a recent spate of shootings across the US that are alleged to involve property owners who fired at young people who approached them either by mistake or for an innocent reason.
Witnesses told the station that Singletary ran out of his home upset after the ball rolled on to his yard and started firing a gun at a neighbor. William White and his six-year-old daughter Kinsley were reported to be seriously hurt during the shooting.
According to reports Kinsley had to have stitches due to bullet fragments in her cheek, and White was seriously injured after being shot in the back. Hilderbrand was grazed by a bullet and was back home on Wednesday after being discharged from a hospital.
Kinsley and her parents’ shootings came six days after Ralph Yarl, a Black teenager, was shot in a separate and unrelated incident by a white man after ringing the man’s doorbell in Kansas City, Missouri.
Yarl, 16, was allegedly shot twice on 13 April by Andrew Lester, 84, after Yarl mistakenly rang Lester’s doorbell believing it was where his two younger brothers were visiting a friend, according to reports.
On 18 April, in another separate and unrelated incident Kaylin Gillis, 20, was allegedly shot and killed by an upstate New York resident after the car she was riding in accidentally pulled into the wrong driveway.
According to reports they were on their way to a party that was actually at a different address. Realizing they were at the wrong address, the group started to back out of the driveway when the resident is alleged to have fired two shots from his porch, striking Gillis in the neck.
“I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her,” Blake Walsh, 19, said of Gillis, his girlfriend, in an NBC interview. “My world was taken from me.”
Walsh was driving the car when the resident is alleged to have shot at the vehicle.
Emergency responders pronounced Gillis dead. The alleged shooter was arrested and was taken into custody.
Days after Gillis was killed, a man in Texas is alleged to have shot and injured two cheerleaders, Payton Washington and Heather Roth, after one almost got into his parked car by mistake, according to reports. Investigators later charged a 25-year-old man on a count of deadly conduct.
The various cases since Yarl’s shooting have trained a global spotlight on US gun culture.
