22 April,2023 08:41 AM IST | Gastonia | Agencies
Kinsley White, 6, shows a wound on her face, Thursday, in Gastonia, N.C. Pics/AP
A North Carolina man accused of shooting and wounding a 6-year-old girl and her parents after children went to retrieve a basketball that had rolled into his yard was arrested in Florida Thursday afternoon, authorities said.
The violence was the latest in a string of recent shootings sparked by seemingly trivial circumstances.
Robert Louis Singletary, 24, was arrested in the Tampa area by Hillsborough County deputies. He was being held without bail on a fugitive warrant. He's scheduled to appear in court Friday. Gaston County Police Chief Stephen Zill said Wednesday that his department and the U.S. Marshals Service's Regional Fugitive Task Force had been searching for Singletary, who fled after the Tuesday night shootings near the city of Gastonia.
Singletary had been out on bond in a December attack in which he assaulted a woman with a hammer. He was wanted in Tuesday's shootings on four counts of attempted first-degree murder, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill inflicting serious injury, and one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
A neighbour, Jonathan Robertson, said the attack happened after some neighbourhood children went to retrieve a basketball that had rolled into Singletary's yard. He said Singletary, who had yelled at the children on several occasions since moving to the neighbourhood, went inside his home, came back out with a gun and began shooting as parents frantically tried to get their kids to safety.
"As soon as I saw him coming out shooting, I was hollering at everybody to get down and get inside," Robertson said.
A 6-year-old girl, Kinsley White, was grazed by a bullet on the left cheek and treated at a hospital and released, she and her family said. Her father, Jamie White, was shot in the back. He remained hospitalized Thursday with serious wounds, including liver damage, according to Kinsley's grandfather and neighbour, Carl Hilderbrand. The girl's mother, Ashley Hilderbrand, was grazed in the elbow. Authorities say Singletary also shot at another man but missed.
It is the latest in recent U.S. shootings for apparently trivial reasons, including the wounding of a Black teenage honours student in Missouri who went to the wrong address to pick up his younger brothers, the killing of a woman who was in a car that pulled into the wrong upstate New York driveway, and the wounding of two Texas cheerleaders after one mistakenly got into a car that she thought was her own.
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