Six-year-old girl in North Carolina shot in the cheek after her basketball rolls into man’s yard

A manhunt is under way in North Carolina after a six-year-old girl and her father were allegedly shot by their neighbour after their basketball rolled into his yard.

Police in Gaston County said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that there were two other victims involved – a woman who was grazed by a bullet and a man who was shot at but not injured.

The suspect, 24-year-old Robert Louis Singletary, faces four counts of first-degree attempted murder.

Police have also charged him with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and one count of possession of a firearm by a felon.

The suspect was previously known to police for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend with a sledgehammer in December 2022.

The girl who was reportedly shot, Kinsley White, has since spoken about the incident to local media outlet WSOC-TV. She said a bullet had hit her cheek and that she is worried about her father, who had more serious injuries.

Kinsley said: “We don’t even know the man. Why did he shoot my daddy and me? Why did he shoot a kid’s dad?”

Her father, Mr William White, remains in hospital and is being treated for a punctured lung and liver problems after he was shot in the back.

The girl’s mother, Ms Ashley Hilderbrand, told WSOC-TV that she had also been outside during the incident and that she heard Singletary make a threat.

“He looked at my husband and my daughter and told them, ‘I’m going to kill you’,” she said.

Gaston County police chief Stephen Zill said on Wednesday that “this sort of violence will not stand”, adding that the department has partnered with the US Marshals Regional Fugitive Task Force for the search.

The shooting is the latest in a string of incidents in the United States where apparently ordinary blunders led to gun violence.

On Tuesday,

an 18-year-old cheerleader was shot and seriously injured

after her friend who wanted to return to their car in a parking lot near Austin, Texas, mistakenly tried to enter a wrong vehicle. Her friend was grazed by a bullet and was mildly injured.

On April 15, a 20-year-old girl was shot and killed in New York state after a friend drove their car down the wrong driveway.

Two days earlier,

a 16-year-old boy in Missouri was shot and injured

in the head and arm after he rang the doorbell of a house, mistaking it for a friend’s house where he was supposed to pick up his younger twin brothers.