Two cheerleaders were injured by a man who opened fire after the girls got into the wrong car in the parking lot of an Elgin supermarket near Austin, Texas. “According to the reconstructions, several shots were fired at the vehicle,” said the police, who arrested Pedro Tello Rodriguez, 25, on the homicide. A helicopter was needed to take to the hospital one of the injured girls who were part of a group of four Woodlands Elite cheerleaders who stopped at the supermarket on their way home from practice around midnight. One of the girls who escaped the shooting, Heather Roth, said on Instagram that she accidentally opened the door of the wrong car and immediately noticed there was a man in the passenger seat. The man then approached his friends’ car and started shooting.
Cheerleading coach Lynn Shearer revealed the identity of seriously injured girl Payton Washington. The resemblance of this shooting to those that took place in Kansas City in recent days is striking, where 16-year-old African American Ralph Yarl was injured by an 84-year-old white man after ringing the wrong address at a rural town in upstate New York, where 20-year-old Kaylin Gills was killed when a homeowner fired a car that accidentally pulled into her driveway.
Incredible incidents that are reigniting the debate about the proliferation and freedom to use guns and the so-called “stand your ground laws”—laws that legitimize the use of firearms in the defense of one’s person or property.