A 5-year-old girl, is recovering at Royal Oak Beaumont Hospital after being shot in the face Wednesday night inside a residence at the Lake Villa Manufactured Home Community.
The Oakland County Sheriff’s Department has 30-year-old Pontiac man suspected of the shooting in custody. He was the boyfriend of the victim’s 21-year-old aunt and is currently on parole for a second-degree murder he committed in the late 1990s. He’s also a suspect in a larceny.
The victim, Jordayna Barrett, a first-grader at Leonard Elementary, sustained non-life threatening injuries and a broken jaw.
A deputy was dispatched to the 300 block of Shummard Branch Road because the suspect had allegedly threatened to shoot his girlfriend’s mother, a 41-year-old Oxford resident and owner of the manufactured home where the shooting took place.
While she was giving details to the deputy for his report, the mother received a call from her daughter, the victim’s aunt, stating she had been involved in a personal injury vehicle accident a short distance away at Lakeville and Glaspie roads.
Both the deputy and mother left the Shummard Branch residence and headed for the accident scene.
While they were away, the suspect, driving a green Ford Taurus, pulled up to the home, opened the unlocked front door and allegedly fired a handgun inside, striking the girl in the face.
The victim’s uncle, who watching Barrett and four other children at the home, identified the suspect for police. The uncle threw a wrench at the suspect’s Taurus as it was leaving the scene, breaking one of the windows.
None of the other children in the home were injured during the shooting.
A short time later, another deputy spotted the suspect’s vehicle and apprehended him in Orion Township near the K-mart on M-24.
According to Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard, the suspect did not have a gun on him or in his vehicle at the time of his arrest. Investigators have yet to locate the gun used in the shooting.
“It could be laying on the side of the road. It could be in a dumpster,” Bouchard said.
Sheriff’s investigators are anxious to recover the missing gun because not only is it a danger to the public, “it’s important evidence.”
“If anybody comes across (a gun), we sure would appreciate a phone call,” Bouchard said. The department’s main number is (248) 858-4950.
The suspect is expected to be arraigned on Friday, Sept. 11 in Rochester Hills 52-3 District Court.
Bouchard’s quite upset by the fact that someone who was originally sentenced to 8-15 years for the second-degree murder and two years for a felony firearms charge is already out on the street allegedly committing another violent crime.
“With all of that, he was out (of prison) in just over seven years,” the sheriff said. “I am absolutely disturbed by it. We’ve been talking about this for months now, how the state is increasingly pushing people out of prison that we think are a danger, are violent, that we think have a history of criminality . . . This, on face value, looks like it”s one of those cases.”
Bouchard noted the state Department of Corrections no longer requires having a job as a condition of parole.
“What do they think they’re going to end up doing?” he said.