A young girl and her father became the victims of an armed man who was annoyed with children playing basketball on the street close to his residence.
Robert Louis Singletary, a 24-year-old man accused of shooting a six-year-old girl and her father in a North Carolina neighborhood, turned himself in to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Tampa, Florida on April 20.
On Tuesday evening, Singletary grew agitated by children playing basketball in the street. He began shouting at the children and threatening them when their ball rolled into his yard, and they went to retrieve it. This prompted the father of one of the children to confront Singletary, who then went inside his house, emerged with a gun, and started firing into the street.
According to witnesses, he pursued the frightened children and adults until he ran out of ammunition. Six-year-old Kinsley White was struck 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 apprehended two days later, approximately 600 miles away from his house. Arrest records reveal that he is being held on a fugitive warrant with no bond.
The Gaston County Police Department issued a statement confirming Singletary’s arrest and that the investigation into the shooting was ongoing. Singletary has been charged with four counts of attempted first-degree murder, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, and one count of firearm possession by a felon.
The Sheriff’s office reported that the young girl was released from the hospital after spending one night there, but her father remained as an inpatient in serious condition. The family was not participating in the basketball game and had been outside grilling while Kinsley was riding her bike.
Singletary has a criminal history, including an arrest in December for assaulting 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 most recent shooting.
This incident marks the fourth shooting in the past couple of weeks in the US due to apparent misunderstandings. A teenager was shot after ringing the wrong doorbell, a woman was killed after a car pulled into the wrong driveway, and two cheerleaders were shot after approaching the wrong parked car.
