Mysterious BB Gun Attack Remains Unsolved

Last week, amid reports of stick beatings (.pdf), backpack attacks on SUVs (.pdf), and shirtless fighting in the streets (.pdf), officers met their most challenging, evasive ne’er-do-well yet on Saturday, April 30, when they were dispatched to investigate a mysterious BB gun attack on the 9000 block of Seward Park Avenue South.

The attack was called in by a (presumably young) boy or teenager living at an apartment building on the block. The boy explained to arriving South Precinct Officer Victor Pirak and “Officer Martin”* that something struck the back of his leg as he buzzed himself into his apartment that afternoon. The first attack went by relatively unnoticed—the victim was wearing jeans and “didn’t feel it very much,” the police report states. But as he walked inside, another “ping” hit the door, causing him to turn around. When he looked across the courtyard to the building opposite, the victim stated that he could see an open window on the bottom floor of another apartment, the telltale sign of a sniper among neighbors.

*Real cops don’t need first names.

The victim told officers that he vaguely knows the apartment dweller’s family and “he figured that someone had shot him with a BB Gun from there,” the police report states. When officers contacted the residents in the building, the victim’s suspicions were confirmed—the residents “admitted that [the suspect] had been over to their place and shot a rifle-type BB gun out the window at [the victim]!”

The police report doesn’t speculate on what might motivate the suspect to shoot BBs at the boy from across an open courtyard—boredom? A school rivalry? Perhaps they were hyper-masculine love taps?

Alas, police couldn’t question the alleged shooter himself—he’d already fled the scene. “The family was cooperative in letting us look around,” writes the reporting officer, but even with assistance from the boy’s gracious neighbors, neither the BB gun nor the person shooting it were located. The stoic shootee declined medical attention.

The supposed BB-gun-toting miscreant remains at large.