PHILADELPHIA-
A 5-year-old girl riding in the back seat of a car was killed by a stray bullet and police said she may have been caught in the crossfire of a moving gun battle.
Casha’e Rivers died Sunday morning after being struck in the chest while riding in a vehicle driven by her mother.
“All this attention, I really don’t want. I just want to find out who did this to my child,” the 22-year-old mother, Alisha Corley, said Monday morning as anti-violence activists rallied outside a relative’s home.
Many different shell casings were found near the site in the city’s Strawberry Mansion section and at a location two blocks away. That, along with statements from residents, led detectives to theorize that the car may have been caught in a shootout between people in other vehicles.
No arrests had been made as of Monday morning.
Three other people were in the car, including the victim’s 1-year-old brother.
Corley agreed to go to Harrisburg, the state capital, on Tuesday to help the NAACP lobby for stricter gun-control laws.
“I’m tired of being in places like this,” said J. Whyatt Mondesire, local chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The group is raising money to pay for Casha’e’s funeral and to offer a reward for information about her killer.
Residents said the violence carried over from a fight that erupted earlier in the weekend.
“But it’s been going on a lot longer than that,” said Kevin Gooden, 36, a plumber who lives nearby. “There are people here who know what happened, and they need to step up, speak out and help stop this killing.”
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