Are there more of these incidents happening these days or is the national press just focusing on them more to help build a narrative? We’ll return to that question in a moment, but there have been a number of shootings taking place in homeowners’ driveways and front yards lately. And not all of them are being committed by illegal aliens. The latest tragic case involved a 14-year-old girl in Starks, Louisiana who was reportedly playing hide and seek with her friends in a neighbor’s yard. The man, 58-year-old David Doyle, came out of his house and shot the young girl in the back of the head. Thankfully, she survived and is expected to make a full recovery, but Doyle is under arrest on multiple charges. (KPIC TV News)
A Starks man has been arrested after being accused of shooting a 14-year-old girl in the back of her head, according to the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office.
Spokeswoman Kayla Vincent said deputies were called out to a home in Starks early in the morning on May 7, in reference to a shooting. When deputies arrived they said they found the girl with a gunshot wound to the back of her head.
The incident happened on Jimmy Doyle Road. The area of the shooting is a dead-end road with only three residents: Doyle, the victim’s family and a relative to the victim’s family.
If you’re not seeing this case showing up in the national news as much as some of the other recent ones, there’s probably a very good reason. As you can see from the mug shot provided, David Doyle is clearly white. The race of the girl who was shot is not given, but the Daily Beast covered this story also and if she had been non-white you can rest assured it would have been in the title and several times in the first paragraph. They didn’t mention it. That’s what I meant above about the narrative. A white person out in the country shooting a white child doesn’t drive the narrative forward.
Even without the racial element, this story does have some strange twists to it, however. This is an isolated community. The name of the road (if you generously call it a road when it’s barely half a mile long) is Jimmy Doyle’s Road. I’m guessing the fact that the shooter’s name is also Doyle isn’t a coincidence. There are only three homes on the road. One is Doyle’s, one belongs to the family of the girl that was shot and the other belongs to relatives of the girl’s family. These people all had to know each other, at least in passing.
According to Doyle, he saw “shadows” outside of his home. He went inside to retrieve his firearm. When he came back out he saw “figures” running away from his home and opened fire, striking the girl. This happened on Sunday morning in broad daylight. Who else would have been in the area except for people from the two other homes? There’s nothing else within easy walking distance except for a cemetery and a place called “Alligator Park.” And how did he not recognize that it was a little girl?
Doyle will have little in the way of self-defense unless his attorney can prove that he has extreme mental illness issues. The stand-your-ground law does not apply to people who are running away.
But we’re still left without an answer to the question of “why.” Why would someone’s first impulse be to shoot at retreating figures even if they didn’t recognize them? Unless investigators can come up with some evidence of a history of trouble between these neighbors, it just seems entirely inexplicable. We’ll stick a pin in this story and come back to it if more details emerge. But for the moment it simply doesn’t make any sense.
