A little girl, and her father, were the victims of a man with a gun who didn’t like kids playing basketball in the street near his home.
Robert Louis Singletary, a 24-year-old man who allegedly shot the six-year-old girl and her father in a North Carolina neighborhood, surrendered to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Tampa, Florida on April 20.
On Tuesday evening, Singletary became upset about kids playing basketball in the street. He started yelling at the children and threatening them when their ball rolled into his yard and they went to retrieve it. This caused the father of one of the kids to approach Singletary, at which point the young man went inside his house, came out with a gun, and started shooting into the street.
Witnesses reported that he chased the terrified children and adults until he ran out of bullets. Kinsley White, a six-year-old girl, was hit in the cheek by a bullet fragment, and her father, William James White, was shot in the back. Kinsley’s mother, Ashley Hildebrand, was also grazed by a bullet.
Singletary fled the scene and was taken into custody two days later, about 600 miles away from the scene of the crime. Arrest records confirm that he is being held on a fugitive warrant with no bond.
The Gaston County Police Department released a statement confirming Singletary’s arrest and that the investigation into the shooting was still ongoing. Singletary has been charged with four counts of attempted murder in the first degree, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, and one count of gun possession by a felon.
According to the sheriff’s office, the little girl was released from the hospital after a night’s stay, but her father remained hospitalized in a serious condition. The family was not involved in the basketball game, and they had been outside grilling while Kinsley was riding her bike.
Singletary has a criminal record and was also arrested last December for attacking his girlfriend with a sledgehammer. He was charged with first-degree kidnapping, communicating threats, and assault with a deadly weapon. He was released on a $250,000 bond in December 2022, four months before the latest shooting.
This shooting is the fourth in less than a week in the US due to apparent mistakes. A teenager was shot after ringing the wrong doorbell, a woman was killed after a car turned into the wrong driveway, and two cheerleaders were shot after approaching the wrong parked car.