WINFIELD — A car driven by a mother transporting her three teenaged children and niece home after an evening of pumpkin-carving was hit with a .22-caliber bullet, believed to be fired by an unidentified pickup truck driver. A motorist behind her reported that his car had also been shot.
Leslie Herman, of Winfield, was driving her daughter, 18; sons, 17 and 15; and niece, 16, back from her sister’s home in Mifflinburg when, around 9 p.m. Sunday on Route 304 approaching New Berlin, “I heard a ‘ping’ sound hit the driver’s side of my car at about the same time that we passed a pickup truck driving in the opposite direction,” Herman said.
She initially thought she’d hit a stone, and that it bounced off her Ford Taurus.
“But it was a pretty hard sound,” she said.
Her son James, one of three passengers in the back seat, said, “Pull over! Pull over!” she said.
She stopped, and her sons examined the car.
“They said, ‘It’s a bullet!’”
Her niece, she said, was afraid to leave the vehicle, asking, “Why would someone do this to us?”
A car pulled behind them, its driver seeing the family examining the door.
She told her son to ask whether that driver’s car had also been shot.
“He said yes,” Herman said. The bullet also hit the driver’s side of that car, she said.
Herman and the other driver called police.
“Two state police cars showed up,” she said, “and they told me that because we couldn’t really describe the pickup it would be hard to find the driver.”
Herman said she hadn’t worried about the incident since Sunday, except, “The other night, a truck passed me and made me think about it again. The thought did go through my head.”
Her husband Randall, who examined the car and said the shot came from a .22-caliber gun, told his wife: “My goodness, any higher, the bullet would have hit the window. Someone could have been killed.”
A woman at work asked Herman: “What if it hit the gas tank?”
Her daughter, a Susquehanna University student who was sitting by the window nearest the shot, told her mother: “I could have been killed.”
Herman recalls it was a large pickup truck, but she doesn’t remember seeing the driver or passengers.
“I can’t say whether it was some kids or not,” she said.
But she’s angry.
“I’m upset,” she said. “We were shot at.”
An officer at the state police station in Milton said Wednesday night he was unaware of the incident, and could offer no further comment.
— Email comments to rdandes@dailyitem.com
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