Toddler hit 4 times in drive-by 20 people home in Kings trailer during attack
Published 12:15 am Sunday, January 8, 2012
A 4-year-old boy remained in a Jackson hospital Saturday night after being hit four times in a drive-by shooting as he ran to his grandmother in the home they share with 18 people in Kings.
Arkeevian Warfield, like the others in the mobile home, had been told to get down on the floor as a hail of bullets — from at least three weapons, Vicksburg police said — rang through the home at midnight Saturday morning. But Arkeevian ran toward his grandmother, Mary Ann Buck, 56, who was in a back bedroom. Along the way, two bullets hit his left leg, one hit his left ankle and one hit his groin.
Later Saturday morning, Arkeevian underwent surgery at University Medical Center’s Blair E. Batson Children’s Hospital in Jackson, to which he was transferred from River Region Medical Center.
None of the other 17 people inside were injured, 19-year-old Sharonda Buck, Arkeevian’s cousin, said Saturday afternoon as she sat on the trailer porch with two of her cousins, all of whom live at the home at 20 Water Well Road.
Lt. Sandra Williams said Saturday the Vicksburg Police Department had identified no suspects in the shooting. She declined to disclose the number of bullets that might have been fired or the type of weapons used, but said two vehicles might have been used in the shooting.
Twenty-two bullet holes could be counted Saturday in the doublewide trailer.
“There’s just not much information right now,” Williams said. “Everything is still under investigation.”
“It’s a miracle no one else got hit,” Sharonda Buck said. “We just all got down on the floor. My heart was beating so fast and I just laid there shaking. Everyone was screaming and crying.”
Arkeevian’s aunt Jakethia Jones was with him at the hospital Saturday night.
She said surgery to remove bullet fragments from his knee and groin lasted about three hours, but by later in the day, he was “sitting up and eating and talking.”
“The rest of us are just all still in shock,” she said.
Arkeevian’s mother, Tasha Buck, is in the Madison County Detention Center, Jones said. A detention center website shows she is being held on convictions of shoplifting, conspiracy and directing/causing a felony to be committed by a person under the age of 17. The website did not include information on her age or the date her sentence began.
Mary Ann Buck said she has owned the trailer since 1989.
“It was just horrible, we’ve never ever had anything like that happen here, and I can’t calm down,” Mary Ann Buck said. “I was sitting on my bed when I heard what sounded like a bunch of firecrackers and we just got down.”