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player ready...A 16-year-old girl was shot in the neck early Sunday in Hobart after what police call a miscommunication between her friends and a man at a gas station on U.S. 6.
Hobart Lt. James Gonzales said the girl, who he did not identify, was at the gas station on the corner of U.S. 6 and Indiana 51 around 12:30 a.m. Sunday with some friends who were in two cars. They had all just left a party at a nearby house, he said, and were joking with each other while at the gas station and possibly using foul language.
“The car loads of kids were talking, being a little bit boisterous with each other,” Gonzales said, adding that they were all juveniles from Hobart, Wheeler and Valparaiso.
He stressed that none of the friends were fighting with each other, but that another man at the gas station apparently thought they were talking to him. The two groups then got into an argument and at some point the man started shooting at the teenagers, police said.
The girl was hit in the neck, and the car she was in fled the scene. Gonzales said he’s not sure when her friends realized she was shot but that they took her to the emergency room at St. Mary Medical Center in Hobart.
The girl has since been airlifted to a Chicago-area hospital, but Gonzales said police are not sure what condition she is in.
A police officer who was in the area at the time reported hearing several shots fired, he said.
The teenagers described the shooter as a Hispanic man who was driving a black Chevy pickup truck that appeared to be a model from the 1990s, police said. Police are still trying to get footage from surveillance videos to get a better image of him, Gonzales said.
He added that police believe the shooting was an isolated incident that happened because of miscommunication.
“It’s not something we’re going to tolerate in our community,” he said.