News/Commentary

6-yr-old girl and parents shot after basketball rolls into neighbor’s yard; was race a factor here, too?

April 20, 2023 | | Print Article

A 6-year-old North Carolina girl and her parents were shot on Tuesday night after a violent neighbor opened fire in response to a basketball rolling into his yard in Gaston County.

According to neighbors, several young children were shooting hoops when the ball rolled down the street and into the yard of Robert Singletary, 24, who, in 2022, had been accused of smacking his 21-year-old girlfriend over the head with a mini-sledgehammer, WSOC reports.

When the ball went into his yard, Singletary became enraged, running down the street and firing his gun at a neighbor, witnesses said.

William White was running with his 6-year-old daughter, Kinsley, when Singletary came back shooting.

Both Kinsley and her dad were seriously hurt, and the little girl’s mother, Ashley Hilderbrand, was grazed by a flying bullet. While Kinsley and Hilderbrand are now home, White is still hospitalized.

Singletary remains on the loose.

“Singletary was last seen with a gun, and should be considered armed and dangerous,” the Gaston County Sheriff’s Office (GCSO)b told the community in a statement. “Singletary is 6 feet, 2 inches tall with brown eyes and black hair, weighing approximately 223 pounds.”

“We don’t even know the man,” Kinsley told WSOC, the stitches she received from the bullet fragments that struck her clearly visible.

Holding onto her grandpa’s hand, she asked the question everyone wants answered.

“Why did you shoot my daddy and me?” she asked. “Why did you shoot a kid’s dad?”

Singletary had recently moved into the neighborhood, neighbors said, and he had a reputation for getting angry with the children who lived there.

So when Kinsley was playing, her father became worried and ran down the street to protect her.

Hilderbrand was outside and heard Singletary threaten her husband and daughter.

“He looked at my husband and my daughter and told them, ‘I’m going to kill you,'” she told the local news outlet.

White desperately tried to draw the gunfire away from the children as Singletary chased them and was ultimately shot in the back in his front yard.

According to Hilderbrand, Singletary kept firing — and, thankfully, kept missing, until his gun was empty.

Kinsley’s grandmother, Carolyn Hilderbrand, said she believed she and her husband would have also been victims of the violence.

“I believe he would have got me and my husband too,” she said. “He just run out of bullets.”

In an update on the horrific event, GCSO announced the charges Singletary faces once he is apprehended.

“Overnight, our detectives secured warrants for Mr. Singletary on four counts of attempted first degree murder, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury, and one count of possession of a firearm by a felon,” the authorities said.

“I want to say to the people of Gaston County – this sort of violence will not stand,” the Sheriff’s Office stated. “We conducted a large-scale search overnight for Mr. Singletary and we have partnered with the United States Marshals Regional Fugitive Task Force to aid us as we continue to search.”

As Singletary fired into neighbors’ homes, more charges are likely to follow.

“We’ll be damn sure to be loud and clear when this case comes to court,” said District Attorney Travis Page.

The Gaston County shooting comes on the heels of a number of insane shootings involving young people.

As BizPac Review reported, a white 84-year-old Kansas City, Missouri, homeowner named Andrew Lester was arrested for first-degree assault after shooting a black teenager named Ralph Yarl, who mistakenly rang his doorbell in search of his brothers, in the head. Lester never even opened the door, allegedly shooting at the teen through his glass window.

The prosecutor in the case, Zachary Thompson, was quick to claim that race played a part in the shocking incident, and the family characterized it as a hate crime.

Lester claimed he feared for his life.

“I can tell you there was a racial component to the case,” Thompson stated, though he provided no evidence to back the claim up.

And in upstate New York, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis and three of her friends were looking for a friend’s home in rural Washington County when they turned into the wrong driveway.

The homeowner, Kevin Monahan,65, allegedly opened fire on the car from his porch. By the time first responders reached the vehicle, Gillis was dead.

On Twitter, people are noticing the disparity in the media’s coverage of Singletary versus its outrage over the shooting of Ralph Yarl.

“That incident was not splashed all over the front page nor the leading item on TV news,” wrote one user of the Singletary case. “But I expect Al Sharpton will be addressing the nation shortly.”

“The legacy media, especially the morning propaganda shows on NBC, CBS and ABC won’t cover this,” tweeted another. “We won’t see their anchors tsk taking and shaking their heads over this story.”

“He clearly was a racist waiting for any excuse to attack whites,” surmised a third.

For Singeltary, Ashley Hilderbrand has a message that has nothing to do with race.

“Just please turn yourself in,” she urged the suspected shooter. “There was no sense in what you did.”

 

Melissa Fine
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