Photo: NBC News
Multiple Little League organizations that participated in a tournament in Wilson, North Carolina, have since dropped out of the baseball event after gunshots were fired from a mystery shooter during one of the games.
The Wilson Police Department confirmed that three shots were fired, NBC News reported, one of them landing in the outfield near one of the Little League players. No one was injured.
A gunman has not been identified and an investigation is still ongoing, according to WITN, but police said Monday that this did not appear to have been a targeted attack. They’ve classified it not as an incident with active shooter but as “shots fired within in the city limits,” having found an unoccupied minivan with its windows shot out near the field, ABC-11 reported.
“I still at this point don’t know how to explain it to my children,” Pius Walcourt, father of one of the Little League baseball players said toTODAY. “Why somebody would act this way, why people would act this way, why there would be these continues acts…”
The incident scared some attendees and Little League teams that participated in the weekend’s tournament enough to decline to return to the tournament in Wilson when play resumed on Monday, according to NBC News.
South Durham Little League, located in Durham, North Carolina, shared onFacebookMonday morning that its “8-and-under” and “9-and-under” teams would be pulled from the tournament. The league — which said its “8-and-under” Orange All-Star Team was on the field when the shots rang out Sunday — went on to say four of the other six leagues that participated in last weekend’s 9U tournament, as well as five of the 11 leagues in the 8U tournament, decided to withdraw from the tournament too.
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“This was not a decision made lightly, but it also was not a difficult decision for us to make,” the league said in its statement. “The events were too traumatic for us to even consider having the teams return to Wilson to play.”
The league called the incident “a terrifying situation for all involved,” in its statement and pointed to the video shared publicly that show coaches covering players with their bodies and crawling through the field.
“Tragic events such as these are happening far too often in our country,” South Durham Little League said in its statement, in an apparent reference to the recentwave of mass shootings in recent months. “We too often think it won’t happen to us. Today, it happened for 7 and 8-year-old Little League players, for children and coaches we all know… No child or parent should ever experience anything like this.”
source: people.com
