Study Finds No Rhyme Or Reason In Stray Bullet Cases

A UC Davis Medical School study found that women and children were most often harmed by stray bullets.

Monday, July 16th 2012, 10:37 pm

By: News On 6

Study Finds No Rhyme Or Reason In Stray Bullet Cases

Police are still looking for the man who opened fire in the Best Buy parking lot and killed two people.

Scott Norman was ambushed and shot in the back in the parking lot. Wesley Brown was hit by a stray bullet when he was shopping inside the store with his 10-year-old daughter.

Hundreds of people are killed by stray bullets every year.

According to a study done by the UC Davis School of Medicine, there's just no rhyme or reason to who gets hit by stray bullets.

Doctor Garen Wintemute studied hundreds of cases like this and says no one can predict when or where a stray bullet may be.

"The vast majority of these people had no idea of the sequence of events that led to the gunfire that killed or injured them, and many of them had no knowledge of the gunfire itself," said Dr. Wintemute.

Wintemute says the study found stray bullets typically hit people younger than 15 and older than 34, nearly half of the victims are women, and 40% of the victims were at home at the time of the incident.

Although Brown's murder was completely random, the intention of Saturday's Best Buy shooting was not.

Tulsa Police say this shooting has ties to a double murder in 2008 where two teenage boys were killed.

Police had two suspects in the case, but no one would testify and the murders went unsolved.

Last year, one of the suspects, Brian Mitchell, was killed inside his home. The other suspect in the 2008 murder was Scott Norman, who was gunned down on Saturday.

Police need your help identifying a person of interest in this shooting.

They say he was last seen wearing a jersey with the number four on it and says "Let's Eat."

If you have any information, call Crime Stoppers at 918-596-COPS.