A girl's father shot a teen boy in Kansas, paralysing him from the waist down as revenge for a prank shooting the teen carried out on his daughter in a savage act of revenge
A Kansas father decided to enact his revenge on the teenager who played a controversial prank on his daughter — by allegedly shooting him in a Walmart parking lot and leaving him paralysed from the waist down.
Anakin Zehring, 18, and two of his buddies were driving near the Walmart in Goddard, Kansas, equipped with gel blasters, looking for their "Senior Assassin" target — allegedly a teen girl or her boyfriend, who were both walking outside near the store.
Zehring and his friends opened fire on them, hitting them multiple times with water-filled polymer beads as they shouted, "I am your senior assassin." The viral social media trend is a complex and dangerous game of tag in which the people who are "it" are given "targets" they have to "tag" off of school grounds by shooting them with toy guns, just as the boys did to the other teens.
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As they tag their targets, the assassins are supposed to record the fake shooting and post it on social media as proof that they succeeded in their mission.
The girl, identified in the police report by her initials, SC, and her boyfriend, identified by his initials, GB, rushed into the store to avoid the vortex of gel beads raining down on them from Zehring and his friends, and SC called her father, Ruben Marcus Contreras, and told him about the shooting, according to local station KWCH.
GB attempted to confront the boys, the publication reported, but was met with hostility, with Zehring or one of his friends allegedly telling him "to meet him out back of the Walmart," a court document obtained by the Wichita Eagle read.
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SC reportedly told her father when she called him that she had no idea who the other teens were or why they were shooting at her. He was there within minutes, and when he arrived, she pointed out the perpetrators, who were getting back into their vehicle on the other side of the parking lot.
That's when the situation escalated severely. Contreras approached the teens, attempting to open the driver's side door to their Chevy Spark and berate them for what they did to his daughter and her boyfriend.
He found them at a nearby Dairy Queen, it was reported, as that's where they went after being kicked out of the Walmart. SC said she looked away, fearing what her father might do. It was worse than she expected.
After opening the door, her father allegedly pulled out a 9mm Smith and Wesson handgun and shot into the window of the vehicle, striking Zehring in the stomach. The bullet traversed his innards and hit his spinal cord.
Zehring had been attempting to drive away, he told the police, and he had thought Contreras was a pedestrian walking through the parking lot, so he had stopped for him at the crosswalk.
SC remembers hearing a "loud pop" and said she watched as the car drove away and crashed into shipping containers nearby. Zehring said his "ears started ringing" after the shot, but he said he didn't realize he'd been hit until he attempted to drive away but couldn't feel his legs. That was why he crashed into the shipping containers — to avoid hitting anything else, he told the police.
Zehring, a recent graduate of Goddard High School, said he hadn't been the one shooting the blaster, but his friends ratted him out, contradicting that claim in statements of their own.
The shot reportedly injured Zehring severely, puncturing his small intestine and damaging his spinal cord, forcing doctors to fuse his L1, L2 and L3 vertebrae, his family wrote on a GoFundMe page designed to raise funds to pay for his recovery.
The shooting happened on May 11, and Contreras was arrested and charged with attempted first-degree murder on May 15, local station KSN reported. He was booked at the Sedgwick County Detention Facility, it was reported and slapped with a $300,000 bail, which he paid via a bond.
