The child was identified as Messiah Taplin by the local coroner.
A 4-year-old boy was shot and killed in Arlington, Texas, in the early hours of the New Year, according to police.
The boy, identified by the medical examiner in Tarrant County as the Messiah Taplin, was shot at around 12:30 pm on Friday and died shortly after 1 am at a local hospital, police said.
The police said they had detained “people of interest” for questioning in the homicide investigation. But no arrests were made.
Police officers went to an apartment complex in the northern suburban city of Dallas after a 911 caller reported hearing gunshots, the Arlington Police Department said in a statement.
When the police arrived, they followed a blood trail that led to an unlocked apartment, according to the statement.
“The police came in and discovered the crime scene. No one was inside the apartment at the time,” the statement said.
As police investigated the scene, a vehicle entered the parking lot that corresponded to a car seen leaving the apartment complex shortly after the shooting, police said. The police stopped the car and detained its occupants.
It was not immediately clear whether the people in the car were the “people of interest” that the police are interrogating.
Homicide detectives were subsequently notified by police in Grand Prairie, about 11 kilometers east of Arlington, that a 4-year-old boy was taken to a hospital in his city and died of an apparent gunshot wound, according to the statement. .
“Investigators believe the child was shot at the Arlington complex on Washington Drive and are working to determine exactly what happened,” the police said in a statement.
No additional information was available on the child’s death.
The child’s death was the second fatal shot to which Arlington police responded in the early hours of the new year. At 12:25 pm, officers received a call for shots fired in a residential neighborhood in eastern Arlington and discovered a woman suffering from an apparent gunshot wound on the back porch of a home, police said in a statement. The woman, whose name was not immediately released, was pronounced dead at the scene.
“Investigators do not believe that this was self-inflicted and that someone shot the woman on the back porch,” says the police statement.
No arrests were made in the shooting.
Authorities asked anyone with information about the murder to contact Arlington police investigators or the Tarrant County Crime Stoppers line.