A 9-year-old girl in Ferguson, Missouri, was killed as she lay in bed Tuesday night when someone fired several rounds into her home.
Police say Jamyla Bolden was still alive when officers responded at about 9:30 p.m. to the gunshots. A city press release says that "two officers tried desperately to keep the little girl alive," but she later died at the hospital, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.
Jamyla's grandmother said she ran downstairs to help the girl when bullets started flying.
“I was holding her the whole time,” she said of the child. “I kept holding and holding her. I still have her blood on my hands. She was still breathing. I was telling her to just breathe.”
Jamyla's mother, 34, was also shot in the leg, and was treated and released from the hospital, according to KMOV.
A shooting motive isn't clear, and police refused to comment on the shooting except to say that they "do everything possible to find the person responsible," WSMV reports.
The Post-Dispatch reports:
"She was very sweet, kind and soft spoken," said Melanie Powell-Robinson, spokeswoman for Riverview Gardens schools. “We're trying to figure out why in the world did this happen. We just can't make sense of this.”
The home where Jamyla was killed is not far from the location on Canfield Drive where Michael Brown Jr. was fatally shot by police last year.
