Man admits random gunshot hit 11-year-old Minneapolis girl in the face

A Fridley man was making a Snapchat video while brandishing an automatic rifle, he admitted in a guilty plea this week, when he squeezed off gunfire that struck an 11-year-old girl looking out her bedroom window.

James William Turner, 44, pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court to being a felon in possession of ammunition in connection with the shooting, which occurred in the first minutes of the new year.

The girl, Laneria Wilson, was taken by emergency responders to HCMC, where she underwent surgery and survived the random gunfire.

“We all need to be outraged that a child in our city can be struck by a bullet through her bedroom window,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said in the aftermath of the shooting.

Turner remains jailed ahead of sentencing, scheduled for Sept. 18. Guidelines call for a term of 8⅓ to nearly 10½ years in prison. However, federal judges have wide discretion and are not bound by guidelines calculation.

Shenedra Ross told the Star Tribune on Friday that her daughter “has a scar on her face that’s horrible. It’s ugly. ... There is a small fragment of bullet in her head that they couldn’t get out, but they said it shouldn’t do any damage to her.”

Since the shooting, Ross moved her family about two hours west of Minneapolis, where they had lived previously.

Now that her daughter is far from Minneapolis and poised to enter seventh grade, Ross added, “she can be a kid and not be traumatized.”

According to court documents, officers arrived at the scene near 23rd and Bryant avenues N., where Ross told them her daughter heard gunfire, went to the window and was hit in the face by one of the rounds.

The mother added that Laneria “heard gunshots ... and yelled to her children upstairs to get away from the windows, but [the girl] has already been struck with a shot,” the criminal complaint read.

Officers found a two-minute Snapchat video recording of Turner moments before the gunfire. He was recorded outside near the girl’s home speaking angrily to the camera before he panned his phone to show an AR-style rifle across the driver’s seat of a vehicle.

“Turner repeatedly fired ... into the ground while standing on the corner,” Thursday’s guilty plea filing read. “One of the bullets ricocheted into a second story bedroom window of a nearby residence and struck an 11-year-old child in the face.”

Police arrested Turner two days later. He said the rifle belonged to a friend. He also said, “I shot the gun in the grass; I did that,” according to the complaint.