9-year-old walks in on shooting at her house
CLEVELAND — A 9-year-old girl and her 2-year-old brother are the only surviving witnesses of a shooting Friday at a home in the Hough neighborhood.
Five people, including a pregnant woman and her unborn child, were killed in what police called an execution-style attack, and detectives are continuing Monday to try to identify a suspect and determine a motive.
"Only an animal would do something like this to another human being," Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said.
Sherita Johnson, 41, was 28 weeks pregnant with a boy when she was shot outside her home around 7:30 p.m. Friday, police said. Lemon Bryant, 60; and Shaylona Williams, 17, also have been identified among the dead.
The name of a 19-year-old male victim has not been released. Police are not saying whether the victims are related to Johnson and her children.
Police believe that Johnson arrived at her home on the East Side of the city with her 9-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son during the initial shootings. While Johnson and her toddler son waited in the car, her daughter entered the home to grab some clothing.
When the child she saw blood and stumbled onto one or more of the shooting victims, police said. Then a black man wearing a mask and armed with a handgun ran toward the girl, firing at her and grazing her chest.
The gunman then went out to the car and shot Johnson, leaving her son uninjured in the back seat of her vehicle.
"There's somebody out there who knows a lot more than we know and we need that information," Williams said. "We don't want to speculate on why this happened."
The deaths happened a day before a police officer shot Tamir Rice, 12, who was standing outside Cudell Recreation Center on the city's West Side with a fake gun, a BB gun that resembles a semi-automatic pistol. Tamir died Sunday at a local hospital.
The girl in Friday's shooting was treated at a local hospital and released. Both she and her brother are staying with family, police said.
Contributing: The Associated Press