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As part of a controversial trend, a high school student fired a toy gun at a father’s daughter, leading to the enraged father shooting the high school senior in a Walmart parking lot, leaving him paralyzed.
According to the Wichita Eagle, 18-year-old Anakin Zehring was in a car with two other men outside a Walmart in Goddard, Kansas, on May 11 when they saw two teenagers walking toward the building and opened fire from the car with a gel blaster.
“I am your senior assassin,” a passenger in the car shouted as two young men, a girl and her boyfriend, were shot multiple times with water-filled polymer bullets.
“Senior Assassin” is an elaborate game of tag in which high school seniors are given a “target” and asked to record themselves “tagging” a victim, usually while away from school, and post the video on social media.
Most games consist of players using water guns, water balloons, or gel blasters, as seen in the case of Seeling.
Several police departments warned parents earlier this year about the potentially deadly consequences of the nationwide game.
According to KWCH, the couple claim they were shot with several bead pellets before running inside the building to escape the gunfire.
Once inside, the girl called her father, Ruben Marcus Contreras, and told him they had been shot with a gel blaster and that she didn’t know who the boys were.
The girl’s boyfriend, named only as “GB” in a police affidavit about the incident, confronted the teenagers and was yelled at by one of them, “who then told him to meet him behind Walmart,” the outlet reported.
The boys had parked their car and tried to enter Walmart, but were turned away and forced to walk to a nearby Dairy Queen.
When Contreras arrived at the store, her daughter pointed out the teenagers who were returning to their car, a Chevrolet Spark.
The enraged father drove into the parking lot and, as Seeling was backing out of the parking lot, confronted the boy as he was trying to open the driver’s side door.
Contreras’ daughter, who gave her name as “SC,” said she saw her father walking toward the car and bowed her head “scared of what was going to happen to him.”
Her terrified daughter heard a “loud bang” and then saw blue sparks fly off and crash into a shipping container.
“(Contreras) appears to run back to the driver’s side of the Spark and pull out a firearm from the right side of his hip joint,” a Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office detective wrote in an affidavit obtained by The Wichita Eagle.
“(Contreras) had a gun in his right hand and placed his right hand through the open driver’s rear seat window. At this point (Contreras) fired one shot into the vehicle.”
Contreras was carrying a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun.
In the affidavit, Zehring told police he thought Contreras was a pedestrian walking through the parking lot who had simply stopped in a crosswalk.
“Mr. Zehring stated he realized he had been shot when he began to hear ringing in his ears. He stated that as he turned west he realized he had no feeling in his legs,” the detective wrote. “Mr. Zehring stated that he did not want to hit anyone in the road so he ran into a pole in the parking lot in an attempt to stop his Spark.”
The Goddard High School graduate also told police he was not the one who fired the gel blaster, a claim contradicted by a passenger who told authorities that Zehring was the one who fired the shot.
The single bullet severely injured Seeling, “piercing his duodenum (the upper part of the small intestine), damaging his spinal cord and causing loss of feeling below the waist,” his parents wrote on GoFundMe.
“The bullet caused significant damage to his body, necessitating fusion of his L1, L2 and L3 vertebrae,” Kenley and Jeremy Seeling added.
The boy was initially hospitalized in critical condition at St. Francis Hospital in Wichita and then transferred to Madonna Rehabilitation Facility in Omaha, Nebraska.
Contreras was arrested May 15 and charged with attempted first-degree murder, according to KSN.
He was being held at the Sedgwick County Detention Center on $300,000 bail and is currently out on bond.
