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A 4-year-old girl was shot in the head and killed during a road rage incident in Albuquerque on Tuesday, police said.
"This should have never happened. This is a complete disrespect of human life," Albuquerque Police Chief Gorden Eden told reporters after the deadly gunfire on Interstate 40.
Police said the gunfire occurred in the westbound lanes of I-40 at around 3 p.m. local time (5 p.m. E.T.), NBC station KOB reported.
Albuquerque Police Department spokesman Officer Simon Drobik told the station that a Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputy discovered the shooting after pulling over to assist a car stopped on I-40. The girl's mother and father were in the car, but no one else was hurt, police said.
"The dad explained there was some type of road rage incident. A car pulled up beside them and started firing rounds into the car," Drobik told KOB.
Eden said the road rage incident involved cars cutting each other off on the interstate, and that witnesses so far have given different information as to a description of the other vehicle that may have been involved.
"We have absolutely no suspect information at this time," Eden said. "We are in desperate need of information to help us resolve the conflicting information we’re getting right now," he said.
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The interstate was busy at the time the shooting occurred, Eden said. "We know that people had to have been witnesses," he said.
"To me, this is one of those crimes which is unexplainable. There is no way to explain your way out of this," Eden said. "It’s 100 percent preventable. It did not have to happen, and we need to rise up as a community and say 'enough is enough.'"