A nine-year-old girl who was accidentally shot dead by a robbery victim who was trying to stop his thief didn’t hear her mother’s scream to duck because she was wearing headphones, her heartbroken family say.
Arlene Álvarez was sitting in the back of her family’s truck watching a movie on Monday night in Houston, Texas, when she was shot in the head.
The bullet was fired by 41-year-old Tony Earls, who had been robbed at gunpoint moments earlier while sitting in his car with his wife after stopping at an ATM. Mr Earls was aiming to strike his attacker when he hit the truck instead, according to police. He is now facing charges of aggravated assault and serious bodily injury.
Arlene’s parents recounted the horror shooting at a news conference on Wednesday as they demanded justice for their daughter, KHOU reported.
“I told everybody to get down, and Arlene’s the only one that didn’t get down, she had her headphones in,” the girl’s father Armando Álvarez said.
Her mother Gwen Álvarez said she shouted: “Duck down, duck down, Arlene.”
“But I didn’t scream loud enough, I didn’t know she had her earphones on,” she recalled through tears.
Gwen Álvarez spoke while clutching a teddy bear with a recording of Arlene’s heartbeat. “This is my baby, this is what I’ve got,” she said.
The parents rejected Mr Earls claim that he acted in self-defence because he thought that the thief had jumped into the Álvarez family’s car.
“He wants to say it’s self-defence. It’s not self-defence,” Armando Álvarez said. “You don’t self-defence when a person is running already two blocks away from you and you’re shooting at that person and then you decide to shoot at a truck just because he’s passing by at a public street. Now my daughter’s gone.”
The father said the family was heading to a Valentine’s Day dinner at Arlene’s favorite restaurant when she was shot.
Mr Earls had called police to report the robbery but allegedly told investigators he didn’t know he’d hit the truck.
Gwen Álvarez called the shooting a road rage incident.
“It just hurts me so much, it’s gonna hurt me forever, but I just want justice for my baby girl,” she said.
“People need to stop having road rage, they need to stop having all this anger towards them and shooting like crazy because there’s a lot of innocent little babies.”
The parents said their daughter, who had two younger brothers and was in fourth grade at De Zavala Elementary School, is “fighting right now for justice, for all these kids getting killed.”
“My daughter had a connection with everybody,” Gwen Álvarez said. “Maybe this had to happen to my daughter so the word could be out.”
Executive Assistant Police Chief Matt Slinkard called the shooting “an unbelievably tragic event”, adding: “It just goes to show, anytime that there’s guns involved, the danger to innocent bystanders is extremely high.”
Mr Earls was being held at the Harris County Jail on a $100,000 bond. Court records didn’t indicate that he had an attorney to speak on his behalf.
Harris County District Attorney’s Office spokesman Dane Schiller said prosecutors will look at elevating the charges against Mr Earls.
“Our hearts go out to the Álvarez family. We are going to review all the evidence, apply the law and determine what charges are appropriate,” Mr Schiller said.
Police are still searching for the robbery suspect and they have not determined if he returned fire or was shot.
Houston, like many other large US cities, has experienced an increase in violent crime during the pandemic, while overall crime has dropped.
Overall crime in Houston dropped by 3.4 per cent in 2021, including a 12 per cent drop in sexual assaults, an 11.4 per cent drop in robberies and a 10 per cent drop in burglaries.
But homicides increased by more than 18 per cent last year to a total of 479. As of Tuesday morning, Houston police had reported 62 homicides so far this year, a 32 per cent increase from the same time period in 2021, when there were 47. During the same time in 2020, there were 40.
The recent surge in homicides is still below Houston’s highest murder tally of 701 homicides in 1981, when the city was dubbed the murder capital of the United States.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
