Man arrested after girl, 13, shot in her home
US teen wrote essay on senseless gun violence
MILWAUKEE: A 13-year-old girl was killed in her bedroom when shots were fired into her Milwaukee home and police are trying to figure out if it was a random attack or if someone in the house was targeted.
Police arrested a 26-year-old man in the shooting, but no charges have been filed. Police did not reveal his identity, and said they don’t know yet if the shooting was random or Sandra’s house had been targeted.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett described the senselessness of the violence.
“Sandra Parks, a 13-year-old, went into her bedroom. She never came out alive,” Mr Barrett said during a news conference outside his office. “Tragically, her death was caused by someone who just decided they were going shoot bullets into her house and she’s dead.”
No other family members were hurt in the shooting.
Bernice Parks, Sandra’s mother, tearfully told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that her daughter “was everything this world is not”.
“My baby was not violent. My baby did not like violence,” she said.
The Journal Sentinel reported that Sandra had taken third place just two years earlier in a citywide competition with her essay commemorating the life of Martin Luther King.
Sandra wrote of seeing “examples of chaos almost every day” and lamented “little children” who were victims of “senseless gun violence”.
The newspaper reported at least three children have been fatally shot in the city in recent years by bullets fired from outside their homes, including a five-year-old girl who was sitting on her grandfather’s lap at the time.
“It is a tragedy that another innocent child’s life has been cut short over nothing,” Alderman Russell Stamper said. “While I am both hurt and angry about this senseless death, the family needs the love and support of the community right now.”