CAHOKIA, Ill. — Two boys are recovering after they were grazed by bullets during a sleepover at a Cahokia Heights home early Tuesday morning.
The boys, 10 and 13, are expected to be OK. They each were grazed on the head. One boy was in a bathroom when a bullet bounced off a sink. The other boy was in a bedroom. Two other boys and several adults were also in the home at the time of the shooting. No one else was injured.
Stellekia McDonald lives in the home with her three children. She and relatives visiting for the holidays became aware that something was wrong when water started shooting out of the bathroom faucet, hitting the ceiling.
"We get up, rushed back there and checked my kids," she said, "and the water from the bathroom sink is, like, flooding over the bathroom."
Later, they would discover a bullet had come through the shower wall and hit the faucet. Soon, they discovered five bullet holes on the exterior of the home. They found at least three more points of entry, inside the home.
Then they realized two of the boys had been hit.
"It ricocheted off the wall, hit the sink, and grazed the baby," said McDonald. "And then another bullet had come through my boys' room, ricocheted and hit the back of another boy's neck."
McDonald said she was terrified. The boys who were hurt are family friends.
"It was kids in here," she said. "What if those bullets would have actually killed them, instead of grazing those kids? And what if my kids would have been getting up to go to the bathroom? This is not a good neighborhood. We hear gunshots a lot of the time. I would have never thought that this would have happened in my house."
The shooting happened just before 3 a.m. on the 700 block of St. Norbert in Cahokia Heights.
Police are searching for the person or people who fired the shots.