A man has been charged with second-degree murder in the US after he allegedly shot and killed a 20-year-old woman as the car she was in mistakenly drove up the man’s driveway.
Kaylin Gillis was with three other people in New York state on Saturday.
They accidentally drove into the driveway of Kevin Monahan in the town of Hebron, police say.
As the driver was leaving, Mr Monahan, 65, allegedly opened fire on the vehicle, hitting Ms Gillis.
“This is a very sad case of some young adults who were looking for a friend’s house and ended up at this man’s house who decided to come out with a firearm and discharge it,” Washington Country Sheriff Jeffrey Murphy told a news conference.
The area is rural, and the driveways are poorly lit at night. None of the group had exited the vehicle or attempted to enter Mr Monahan’s house before he allegedly opened fire, Mr Murphy said.
“There’s clearly no threat from anyone in the vehicle,” Sheriff Murphy said. “There’s no reason for Mr Monahan to feel threatened.”
The friends drove away from the house and attempted to call for help in a nearby town, but Ms Gillis was pronounced dead by paramedics.
Mr Monahan was “uncooperative with the investigation and refused to exit his residence to speak with police”, the sheriff’s office said in a news release.
An attorney for Mr Monahan, Kurt Mauser, told CNN he was unaware that the bullets he fired had hit someone and had no idea why police were on his property.
Hebron Town supervisor Brian Campbell told Northeast Public Radio that it’s “very easy for people to get lost on back roads here”.
“You don’t know how many times I’ve been awakened early in the morning [by] people lost, run out of gas, over a ditch, you go tow them out, put them on their merry way. You never think of your own safety even,” he said.
In a statement sent to CBS News, the BBC’s US media partner, Ms Gillis’s family called her “a kind, beautiful soul and a ray of light to anyone who was lucky enough to know her”.
They said the 20-year-old was an artist and a “Disney fanatic” who was looking forward to starting college in Florida so she could become a marine biologist.
“Our family will never be the same but we will be guided by Kaylin’s positivity, optimism, and joy as we learn to live with her loss.”
On Tuesday, the Schuylerville Central School District held a press conference where former school officials spoke about how much she will be grieved in the “close-knit community”.
Ms Gillis graduated in 2021, and two of her younger siblings attend school in the district.
A GoFundMe page was created to help Ms Gillis’s family “with funeral and other expenses”.
Separately, a householder in the US state of Missouri was charged with shooting a teenager who rang the wrong doorbell while picking up his younger brothers.
Source: bbc.co.uk
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