A Fridley man was making a Snapchat video while brandishing an automatic rifle, he admitted in a guilty plea this week, when he squeezed off a round of gunfire that struck an 11-year-old girl inside a nearby home.
James William Turner, 44, pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court to being a felon in possession of ammunition in connection with the shooting, which occurred in the first minutes of the new year on Jan. 1.
The girl was taken by emergency responders to HCMC for what police described as noncritical injuries.
“We all need to be outraged that a child in our city can be struck by a bullet through her bedroom window,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said in the aftermath of the shooting.
Turner remains jailed ahead of sentencing, scheduled for Sept. 18. Sentencing guidelines call for a term of 8⅓ to nearly 10½ years in prison. However, federal judges are not bound by guidelines calculation.
According to court documents, officers arrived at the scene near N. Bryant and 23rd avenues, where a woman told them her 11-year-old daughter heard gunfire, went to the window and was hit in the face by one of the rounds.
The mother told police that her daughter “heard gunshots … and yelled to her children upstairs to get away from the windows, but [the girl] has already been struck with a shot,” the criminal complaint read.
Officers found a 2-minute Snapchat video recording of Turner moments before the gunfire. He was recorded outside near the girl’s home speaking angrily to the camera before he panned his phone to show an AR-style rifle across the driver’s seat of a vehicle.
“Turner repeatedly fired … into the ground while standing on the corner,” Thursday’s guilty plea filing read. “One of the bullets ricocheted into a second story bedroom window of a nearby residence and struck an 11-year-old child in the face.”
Officers found eight live cartridges and 24 discharged cartridge casings throughout the boulevard, sidewalk and yard.
Police arrested Turner two days later. He said the rifle belonged to a friend. He also said, “I shot the gun in the grass; I did that,” according to the complaint.
Turner’s earlier convictions for second-degree assault in Anoka County and domestic assault in Ramsey County bar him from possessing guns or ammunition.
Source Agencies
