North Carolina 6-year-old, parents shot over stray ball, neighbor says; suspect arrested
GASTONIA, N.C. — 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 on 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, according to online jail records. 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 at a news conference Wednesday that his department and the U.S. Marshals Service’s Regional Fugitive Task Force had been conducting a broad search for Singletary, who fled after the Tuesday night shootings near Gastonia, a city of roughly 80,000 people west of Charlotte.
Singletary had been out on bond in a December attack in which authorities say 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.
Zill declined to say what sparked the attack, explaining that the investigation was ongoing.
Neighbor Jonathan Robertson said the attack happened after some neighborhood 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 neighborhood, 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 Missouri “stand your ground†law may come into play in the shooting of Ralph Yarl, a Black 16-year-old who mistakenly went to the wrong Kansas City home.
A 6-year-old girl, Kinsley White, was grazed by a bullet in the left cheek and was treated at a hospital and released, she and her family said. Her father, Jamie White, who had run to her aid, was shot in the back. He remained hospitalized Thursday because of serious wounds, including liver damage, according to Kinsley’s grandfather and neighbor, Carl Hilderbrand. The girl’s mother, Ashley Hilderbrand, was grazed in the elbow. Authorities say Singletary also shot at another man but missed.
“It was very scary,†Ashley Hilderbrand said Wednesday. “My daughter actually got to come home last night. She just had a bullet fragment in her cheek.â€
It is the latest in a string of recent U.S. shootings that occurred for apparently trivial reasons, including the wounding of a Black teenage honors 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 apparently mistakenly got into a car that she thought was her own.
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