Tragedy Strikes: 6-Year-Old Girl, Parents Shot and Wounded Over Stray Ball Incident

In Gastonia, North Carolina, a man shot and wounded a 6-year-old girl and her parents when the kids went to get a basketball that had rolled into his yard. This is just one of many shootings caused by something small.

Gaston County Police Chief Stephen Zill announced at a news conference that his team and the U.S. Marshals Service are looking for 24-year-old Robert Louis Singletary, who ran away after shots were heard in Gastonia Tuesday night. Gastonia is a city of about 80,000 people near Charlotte.

A man named Singletary is in trouble after assaulting a woman with a hammer last December and shooting at four people on Tuesday. He faces charges including attempted murder, using a deadly weapon to hurt someone seriously and having firearms while being a criminal. Singletary hasn’t been seen since last Tuesday and still police are looking for him as of Thursday.

The exact cause of the attack is still being investigated, but neighbor Jonathan Robertson said that all started when some kids from the neighborhood tried to get a basketball which had gone into Singletary’s yard. Apparently, Singletary had yelled a lot at these kids. After this incident, Singletary went inside his home and came back out with a gun before shooting it as parents were reactively trying to get their children away from there safely.

I shouted that everyone should duck and go inside as soon as I saw him walking towards us with a gun.

Kinsley White, who is 6-years-old, was shot in the cheek and had to get treatment from a hospital. Her dad Jamie White was shot in the back and is still in serious condition with liver damage. Kinsley’s mom Ashley Hilderbrand was also wounded on her elbow. The shooter tried firing at another man but missed him.

Ashley Hilderbrand said Wednesday that it was very scary. In fact, her daughter returned home the night before with a bullet fragment stuck in her cheek.

Recently in the US there have been several shootings that started because someone did something minorly wrong. For example, a Black teenager was hurt because he went to the wrong house to pick up his brothers, a woman was killed because she drove into the wrong driveway and two cheerleaders were shot after one of them accidentally got into the wrong car.