A manhunt is underway in North Carolina after a man reportedly shot a 6-year-old girl and her father after a basketball rolled into his yard.
Robert Louis Singletary, 24, is considered armed and dangerous after fleeing the scene of the shooting, which occurred just before 8 p.m. Tuesday in Gastonia, just west of Charlotte, police said.
“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 press conference with police Wednesday.
Neighbors at the scene said the multiple shots of gunfire were in response to children playing ball.
“They were playing basketball and a ball rolled into his yard and they went to go and get it,” Jonathan Robertson, who described Singletary as being known for yelling at local children, told Charlotte station WBTV. “It was just crazy.”
“He came out with a gun, he started shooting,” the wounded girl recalled of the events to Queen City News. “Hope my daddy is okay.”
The child and the man were seriously wounded in the gunfire while a woman, identified in local reports as the wounded girl’s mother, was grazed by a bullet. A third adult was also shot at but not injured, police said.
The girl has since been discharged from a hospital while the wounded 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 inflicting serious injury, and one count of possession of a firearm by a felon.
There were no immediate updates Thursday on the hospitalized man’s condition or on the search for Singletary.
The shooting appears to be just the latest incident in which a young person was shot for seemingly being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Earlier Tuesday, two cheerleaders were shot outside a Texas grocery store after one of them reportedly mistook a parked car for her own and got inside before exiting. A man inside the vehicle followed the cheerleader back to her friend’s car where he fired multiple rounds into the car, striking two young women inside, police said.
On Saturday, a 20-year-old woman was fatally shot in Hebron, New York, after accidentally pulling into a stranger’s driveway. A 65-year-old man at the nearby home came out and fired two shots at 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 had mistakenly gone to the wrong house to pick up his younger siblings when police said 84-year-old Andrew Lester shot a gun through the door’s glass, striking Yarl in his head and arm.