A manhunt is underway in North Carolina after a man allegedly shot and killed a 6-year-old girl and her father after a basketball landed in his backyard.
Robert Louis Singletary, 24, is believed to be armed and unsafe after fleeing the scene of the shooting, which happened shortly before 8:00 p.m. Tuesday in Gastonia, just west of Charlotte, a told the police.
“This is an individual with a violent past, and just from the actions yesterday that he is suspected of taking, obviously this is a dangerous individual,” Gaston County Communications Director Adam Gaub said at a news conference media Wednesday with the police.
Gastonia County Police
Neighbors at the scene said the multiple shootings were in response to children playing catch.
“They were playing basketball and a ball rolled into his yard and they went to get it,” Jonathan Robertson, who described Singletary as known for yelling at local kids, told Charlotte station WBTV. “It was just crazy.”
“He came out with a gun, started shooting,” the injured girl recalled of the events to Queen City News. “I hope my father is well.”
The boy and the man were seriously injured in the shooting, while a woman, identified in local news reports as the injured girl’s mother, was hit by a bullet. A third adult was shot but not injured, police said.
The girl was released from a hospital, while the injured man remained hospitalized Wednesday, police said.
Singletary is wanted on four counts of attempted first degree murder, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill with serious injury and one count of possession of a firearm by a felon.
There were no immediate updates on the man’s condition or the search for Singletary Thursday.
The shooting appears to be just the latest incident where a young man has been killed for apparently being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Two cheerleaders were shot outside a Texas grocery store on Tuesday after one of them allegedly mistook a parked car for her and entered before exiting. A man inside the vehicle followed the cheerleader to her friend’s car, where she fired several shots into the car, hitting two young women inside, police said.
A 20-year-old woman was fatally shot in Hebron, New York on Saturday after accidentally shooting an unknown assailant in her driveway. A 65-year-old man from the nearby home got out and fired two shots into the vehicle, killing Kaylin Gillis, police said.
And on April 13, a 16-year-old teenager was shot twice after ringing a man’s doorbell in Kansas City, Missouri. Ralph Yarl mistakenly went to the wrong house to pick up his younger siblings when police say 84-year-old Andrew Lester fired a gun through the glass door, hitting Yarl in the head and arm.
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