A three-year-old boy was shot dead in Phoenix and a 61-year-old woman was shot dead in Houston while people were celebrating the New Year, authorities said.
The little boy was run over by random shots in a back garden. The woman died from a stray bullet outside her home.
While it was not immediately known why the two shots were fired in either case, firing guns into the air to celebrate the new year and other holidays is a long-standing practice in some places.
In Arizona, the practice is a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. The relevant law was passed in 1999, after a stray bullet killed a 14-year-old girl, Shannon Smith, in Phoenix.
Since then, police have knocked on doors to warn people to fire guns on holidays. They can also use a system called ShotSpotter, a system that identifies where a weapon has been fired.
The three-year-old boy who was shot Tuesday night was expected to survive the wound left by a bullet fragment, the Republic of Arizona reported.
The Houston Chronicle reported that police and Harris County Sheriff’s deputies issued public alerts on New Year’s Eve warning the public not to unload weapons while celebrating.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said Philippa Ashford died after she was shot at 12:01 a.m. on the first day of 2021. It looks like she may have been run over by celebratory shots from outside her own neighborhood.
The sheriff’s office said Ashford’s family and neighbors were throwing fireworks at her cul-de-sac when she said she had been shot. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
“We have no indication that any family member or anyone in the alley unloaded a firearm and we walked the streets and scanned up and down to see if we found any bark in the neighborhood and we didn’t find anything,” he said. in the Chronicle Sergeant Ben Beall, a spokesman for the sheriff.
Ashford’s body was sent for an autopsy and the sheriff’s department requested that he call anyone with information about his death.