DETROIT – A Detroit police vehicle spent the day at the corner of Lindsay Street and Trojan Avenue, where the scary incident happened on Tuesday night, when another child in the city was injured by gunfire.
Update: Minor in custody after 5-year-old boy shot by stray bullet on Detroit’s west side
The shooting happened at Fargo-Oakfield Park around 9 p.m.
The little boy was riding his bike while his father walked with him when they heard shots ring out.
One of them came down and hit the little boy in the arm.
“That’s a traumatic thing for a 5-year-old to go through,” LaRon Kinney said. Kinney, 55, grew up in the neighborhood near 8 Mile and the Southfield Freeway and still comes out to tend to his mother.
“All he’s trying to do is enjoy the summer,” Kinney said. “This is what we have when we don’t have adult supervision around the children”
Detroit police Chief Todd Bettison said that they have a person of interest in the shooting of a teenager who may have been firing off random shots in the air.
“From what I’m being told, it doesn’t appear that he was being shot at the child at all,” Bettison said on Tuesday night. “When you fire a weapon, what goes up must come down.”
Local 4 spoke with the boy’s father on Wednesday afternoon. He says his son is back home and physically recovering from the injury to his arm, but is “traumatized” by the incident and also wonders what else he could’ve done.
“Every day,” Marla Hewin, a neighbor who lives across the street from the park, said on Wednesday. “There’s something going on on Lindsay Street every day.”
Hewin has lived on the corner right across from the park for the last two years after moving there from Mack and Warren on the city’s East Side.
One of the bullets hit the side of her house, just missing her living room window.
Hewin said that she knows the little boy’s family and noted that his father is one of the few on the block who diligently watches his children when they’re outside.
“He’s never outside by himself,” Hewin said. “I feel really bad for him because he does watch his son.”
Hewin says that the issues with teens causing trouble in the neighborhood, which echo concerns about “teen takeovers” in other parts of the city, need to be addressed with increased police patrols and better parental supervision to prevent similar incidents from happening again.
“We as older people can’t even go to the park and walk around because the teens have taken over,” Hewin said.
Anyone with information about the shooting is asked to contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-SPEAK-UP or the Detroit Police Department’s 8th Precinct.