A man shot and wounded two cheerleaders in a Texas supermarket parking lot after one of them said she mistakenly got into his vehicle thinking it was her own — the latest in a string of recent US shootings apparently sparked by someone showing up at the wrong place.
The shooting in Elgin, east of Austin, happened early on Tuesday in a grocery store parking lot that serves as a carpool pickup spot for members of the Woodlands Elite Cheer Company, team owner Lynne Shearer said.
Heather Roth, one of four team members transferring rides in the lot after practice, said she got out of her friend’s vehicle and into a vehicle she thought was hers, but there was a stranger in the passenger seat, KTRK-TV reported.
Photo: AP
She said she panicked and got back into her friend’s vehicle, but the man got out of his vehicle and approached.
She said she tried to apologize through her friend’s car window, but the man threw up his hands, pulled out a gun and opened fire.
Roth was grazed by a bullet and was treated at the scene, police said.
Her teammate Payton Washington, 18, was shot in the leg and back.
“Payton opens the door, and she starts throwing up blood,” Roth said.
Washington was flown to hospital in critical condition. Doctors had to remove part of Washington’s spleen, KTRK-TV reported.
Police arrested a suspect, 25-year-old Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr, who is charged with engaging in deadly conduct, a third-degree felony. Online court records do not list an attorney for him.
According to a probable cause affidavit that police released on Wednesday, a store manager said he witnessed the shooting and officers tracked down Rodriguez using parking lot surveillance video that captured his license plate number.
The affidavit did not indicate whether the footage captured the shooting or what preceded it.
Shearer said Washington, a high-school senior from Round Rock, north of Austin, is one of her team’s stars and was born with only one lung.
“She’s really a huge face in the all-star cheerleading world,” Shearer said. “She’s a mentor and role model to so many kids in this industry. She’s an amazing athlete, amazing kid, so everybody knows her and everybody’s praying for her.”
Washington has committed to competing for Baylor University’s acrobatics and tumbling team next year, and her and her Woodlands teammates were set to compete at the Cheerleading Worlds in Orlando, Florida, this weekend.
Shearer said the team would now be “competing for her.”
The shooting came days after two high-profile shootings that occurred after victims went to mistaken addresses. In one case, a black teen was shot and wounded after going to the wrong Kansas City, Missouri, home to pick up his younger brothers. In the other, a woman looking for a friend’s house in upstate New York was shot and killed after the vehicle she was riding in mistakenly went to the wrong address.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS