A Louisiana man was arrested and charged with shooting and wounding a 14-year-old girl playing hide-and-seek on his property, officials said.
Deputies responded to a shooting early Sunday at a home in Starks, near the border of Louisiana and Texas, the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
A 14-year-old girl was found with a gunshot wound to the back of her head on the property of David Van Doyle, 58. Further investigation revealed that several minors, whom the sheriff’s office identified as neighbors, were playing hide-and-seek in the area and hiding on Doyle's property.
Van Doyle told detectives he saw "shadows" outside his home, went inside to get his firearm and then "went back outside and observed people running away from his property, at which time he began shooting at them and unknowingly hit the girl," the news release says.
Van Doyle was arrested and charged with aggravated battery, four counts of aggravated assault with a firearm and illegal discharge of a firearm, the sheriff's office said. Bond is pending.
It was not known whether he has an attorney.
The girl was taken to a hospital for treatment of non-life- threatening injuries.
The investigation continues, the sheriff's office said.
The shooting is the latest of at least four similar incidents, sparking a national conversation around gun violence, as well as “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine,” both self-defense laws.
On April 13, Ralph Yarl, 16, was shot when he rang the wrong doorbell as he was trying to pick up his younger twin brothers from a friend’s home in Kansas City, Missouri. Andrew Lester, a white man in his 80s, was accused of shooting Yarl, who is Black, and charged with first-degree assault and armed criminal action.
Yarl was shot in the head, cracking his skull and leaving him with a traumatic brain injury, his family's attorney said.
On April 15 in upstate New York, Kaylin Gillis, 20, was fatally shot after the car she was in with her boyfriend and two friends turned into the wrong driveway as they were looking for a friend's house. Kevin Monahan, 65, was arrested on a charge of second-degree murder.
On April 18 in Texas, two cheerleaders were shot, one critically, after one of them mistakenly tried to get into the wrong car in a supermarket parking lot. The suspect, Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr., 25, was charged with deadly conduct, a third-degree felony, police said.
In North Carolina, also on April 18, a man allegedly shot and wounded a 6-year-old girl and her father after a basketball rolled into his lawn, a neighbor said. Robert Louis Singletary, 24, turned himself in days later in Tampa, Florida, after a manhunt.
