Robert Louis Singletary, 24, is in custody in Florida.
The man who allegedly shot his six-year-old neighbor and her parents after a basketball rolled into his yard in North Carolina has turned himself in. A manhunt had been ongoing since Tuesday night.
Robert Louis Singletary, 24, is in custody in Florida, and is due to have a hearing today about his extradition. Per CNN, the incident kicked off after a basketball rolled into Singletary’s yard. Singletary yelled at kids retrieving their ball, after which one of their fathers went to him and said something like “stop cussing my kid out, if you got a problem come to me and we can work it out.”
An astounding reaction
Singletary reportedly went back inside his house, retrieved his gun, came out again, and began shooting. He hit six-year-old Kinsley, her mother, Ashley Hilderbrand, and her father. He shot Kinsley in the cheek, and grazed Hilderbrand on the elbow. The father remains in hospital, and is reportedly in serious condition.
“It was very scary,” Hilderbrand said per NBC. “My daughter actually got to come home last night. She just had a bullet fragment in her cheek. Still, scary, but my husband, he’s still in the hospital.”
“I couldn’t get inside in time so he shot my daddy in the back,” Kinsey told CNN affiliate WBTV.
Singletary had reportedly lived in the area for less than a month, and regularly complained about kids’ belongings ending up on his property. Another neighbor told NBC that while it’s normal for balls and the like to wind up in people’s gardens, no one complains, as it’s easy enough to sort out.
“We never expected anybody would break a gun out amongst all those kids,” neighbor Jonathan Robertson told WBTV. “I mean that was insane.”
A disturbing pattern
The incident comes hot on the heels of several other upsetting events which have seen gun owners take wildly disproportionate action in response to everyday mistakes by other people.
Andrew Lester, an 84-year-old white man, shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl when he rang his doorbell last week in Kansas City. Lester told police they didn’t exchange words before he fired his revolver at the Black teen.
Two cheerleaders were shot by a man outside a Texas supermarket after one mistakenly got in his car, and 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis was killed after accidentally pulling into 65year-old Kevin Monahan’s driveway in upstate New York.
This violence has put a spotlight on “stand your ground” laws, which experts believe have fueled the belief that people can use guns in self-defense “anytime they perceive a threat.”
