The 11-year-old who gunned down his younger neighbor when she wouldn’t bring him her puppy had relentlessly harassed the girl, long before shooting her to death on Saturday.
“When we first moved to White Pine [Tennessee] the little boy was bullying her,” explained the 8-year-old victim’s mom. “He was making fun of her, calling her names, just being mean to her,” she said.
That abuse carried into the classroom too, of course, leading the girl’s mother to speak to the school principal about the vicious boy: “I had to go to the principal about him, and then he quit for awhile. Then all of a sudden yesterday, he shot her.”
“She was a precious little girl,” the woman tearfully added. “She was a mommy’s girl -- no matter how bad of a mood you were in, she could always make you smile.”
The school’s principal refused to confirm or deny her report regarding the shooter’s history of bullying her daughter, citing “an ongoing police investigation.”
Witnesses say the suspect was clearly angry at his neighbor for ignoring him when he aimed a shotgun from his bedroom window at her, firing it and fatally wounding the child as she played in her yard with a friend.
Prosecutors have indicated that they’re considering charging the juvenile as an adult for his brutal crime.
