A North Carolina man accused of shooting and wounding a 6-year-old girl and her parents after children went to retrieve a basketball that had rolled into his yard was arrested in Florida Thursday afternoon, authorities said.
The violence was the latest in a string of recent shootings sparked by seemingly trivial circumstances.
Robert Louis Singletary, 24, was arrested in the Tampa area by Hillsborough County deputies, according to online jail records.
He was being held without bail on a fugitive warrant. He’s scheduled to appear in court Friday.
Gaston County Police Chief Stephen Zill said at a news conference Wednesday that his department and the US Marshals Service’s Regional Fugitive Task Force had been conducting a broad search for Singletary, who fled after the Tuesday night shootings near Gastonia, a city of roughly 80,000 people west of Charlotte.
Singletary had been out on bond in a December attack in which authorities say he assaulted a woman with a hammer.
He was wanted in Tuesday’s shootings on four counts of attempted first-degree murder, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill inflicting serious injury, and one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Zill declined to say what sparked the attack, explaining that the investigation was ongoing.
However, neighbor Jonathan Robertson said the attack happened after some neighborhood children went to retrieve a basketball that had rolled into Singletary’s yard.
He said Singletary, who had yelled at the children on several occasions since moving to the neighborhood, went inside his home, came back out with a gun and began shooting as parents frantically tried to get their kids to safety.
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