An Alabama family is devasted after their teenage son was fatally shot while he sat in his room playing on his iPad.
Tuscaloosa Police said Kei’lan Allen was sitting at home innocently on Friday evening when bullets were fired at his home, piercing through a window and striking the boy in the head.
Allen’s 26-year-old cousin Corey Prewitt stated, “I don’t even think he heard the gunshots,” Prewitt said because of the headphones. “I’m pretty sure it was an AR-pistol that hit his head.”
Kei’lan’s mother, Christina Barnes, called her son’s name repeatedly after the shots rang out. He was her first-born and her only son.
“He didn’t answer after that, so she walked in the room, and he was slumped over,” Prewitt said. “She just grabbed him and was telling him, ‘I love you. I love you.’ An innocent child with a bullet hole in his head. ”
Police said in a statement, “The parents and family of a 13-year-old boy had to stand across the street and watch paramedics drive the ambulance away after realizing there was nothing they could do.”
Tuscaloosa Police Chief Brent Blankley called the teen’s death “a senseless murder.”
“We see it all the time where adults are shot, and it’s terrible, but when it’s a kid, it takes it to another level,” Blankley said in a video posted to the Tuscaloosa police department’s Facebook page. “We’re all dads and moms out here. When you see that, and you see the senseless tragedy of that, you know, it hits you different.”
