Two Texas cheerleaders were shot after one of the girls mistakenly got into the wrong vehicle in a grocery store parking lot in Elgin, according to news reports.
Officers in Elgin, just northeast of Austin, responded to reports of gunfire outside an H-E-B shortly after midnight early Tuesday morning, police said in a statement. One girl was flown to the hospital and is in critical condition, and one was treated at the scene, police said.
A suspect, Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr., 25, has been charged with deadly conduct, a third-degree felony.
Lynn Shearer, owner of Woodlands Elite Cheer Co., told KXAN in Austin that the cheerleaders were on their way home from practice when they stopped at H-E-B, where some had parked their cars.
One of the girls accidentally tried to get into the wrong car, Shearer told the station. Then a “guy got out and they saw that he had a gun. And so they tried to speed off and he shot his gun, like five times or so into the car.”
Shearer identified the critically injured girl as Round Rock ISD student Payton Washington.
This marks the third similar shooting in recent days, in which young people were shot going to the wrong places.
A 16-year-old, Ralph Yarl, was shot after ringing the wrong doorbell in Kansas City, Missouri, trying to pick up his younger brothers, and 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis was shot and killed after pulling into the wrong driveway looking for a friend’s house in rural upstate New York.
