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Gaston County Police named the suspect as Robert Louis Singletary and said arrest warrants had been obtained for the 24-year-old. He has been charged with four counts of attempted first-degree murder; two counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill or inflicting serious injury; and one count of possession of a firearm by a felon, the police said in a statement Wednesday. Residents were warned against approaching Singletary if they saw him and instead to call police.
“We don’t even know the man,” the 6-year-old, who was injured in the face by bullet fragments, told WSOC-TV, which identified her as Kinsley White. “Why did you shoot my daddy and me? Why did you shoot a kid’s dad?” she said.
Her father stepped in to draw the shots away from the children, and the gunman chased him, hitting him in the back with a bullet, WSOC reported.
“He looked at my husband and my daughter and told them ‘I’m gonna kill you,’” said her mother, Ashley Hilderbrand.
The girl’s grandmother told WSOC that the gunman fired until he ran out of bullets.
“We never expected anybody would bring a gun out among all those kids. I mean, that was just insane,” Jonathan Robertson, who lives in the neighborhood, told WBTV. “They were playing basketball here and a ball had rolled down that way and had rolled into the yard and they went to go get it,” he said.
The search for the suspect follows at least three other shootings within days that became flash points in the national debate on gun violence and self-defense.
While there were key differences in the incidents, they all involved someone being shot in an interaction with a person they apparently did not know.
Last week, Ralph Yarl, a Black 16-year-old, was shot and injured in Kansas City, Mo., when he went to the wrong house to pick up his siblings. Andrew D. Lester, an 84-year-old White man, was charged.
Days later, in New York, a 20-year-old woman was shot dead after she and her friends accidentally pulled into the wrong driveway. And two Texas cheerleaders were shot this week after one girl mistakenly got into the wrong car in a grocery store parking lot, she said.
In the Yarl case, which sparked protests and public outrage, prosecutors said there was “a racial component.” The shooting has highlighted a pattern researchers describe among shootings of young Black males, in which they are given the attributes of adults, and the fears of Black parents about the consequences of racist assumptions toward their children.
