‘Helpless’: Video shows shooting from car toward crowded park in Villa Heights

CHARLOTTE — Channel 9 obtained video showing someone shooting from a car toward a park packed with families over the weekend.

It happened just after 7 p.m. Sunday at Cordelia Park in Charlotte’s Villa Heights neighborhood.

In video sent to Channel 9, you can see what look like puffs of smoke from a gun held out the window, which someone appears to shoot four times toward a playground.

Authorities said no one was hit in the incident.

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Keith Berley lives in a house next to the park and said he takes his 3-year-old daughter there all the time.

“We’re there all the time ‘til it gets dark, and it was definitely still very light out,” he told Channel 9′s Evan Donovan.

Berley heard the shots and saw the car drive away, and then later saw the surveillance video from his neighbor’s camera.

“Reliving that was almost more scary, to actually see the video of somebody with a gun out of the window, and seeing the four shots with the smoke coming off pointing it at the playground,” he said.

Chantelle Smith is the president of the Villa Heights Community Organization. She said she works closely with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department to make the neighborhood better, but these things do still happen.

“I feel like that’s what’s special about Villa Heights,” she said.

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“So just really feel like a symbiotic relationship, no one doing it on their own, we’re all trying to progress this neighborhood forward -- toward peaceful living,” Smith added.

Berley feels the same. He said he’s loved living there for the past four years, but things affect him differently now that he’s a father.

“That’s the scariest part,” he said.

“Thinking about my daughter possibly at that park playing, it tugs at your heartstrings,” he said. “It’s devastating, such a helpless feeling as a dad thinking about what could happen to her.”

Channel 9 checked CMPD’s crime map around Cordelia Park and did not see the shooting listed. We did find there were just five crimes reported within a half-mile radius of the park over the last week. Two of those were aggravated assaults -- one with a gun on Friday and the other with a knife on Saturday. One car was reported stolen and two were larcenies from vehicles.

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