A quiet evening stroll through his neighbourhood in Westmount turned to terror in the blink of an eye for Londoner Patrick Bowman. “I see a barrel, it doesn’t look like a toy. You don’t know if you’re going to die at that moment. That’s what I felt like. ‘I’m going to get blown away by someone for fun,’” Bowman recounted. Last Tuesday, May 27, the London barber was walking at Viscount Street and Farnham Road when an SUV drove by, with whom he believes were three teenaged boys. He says one of them hoisted a weapon through the window and opened fire, hitting him three times. “And it didn’t hurt, it stung, ‘one two three,’ and I felt it and went backwards. I put my hand up because I thought he was going to raise the barrel up and fire at my face, and I didn’t want to get one in the eye,” he explained. Bowman says he wasn’t going to report it, until he saw a post on social media reporting a woman was also fired at with a pellet gun by young people in an SUV in the same neighbourhood. “They got a picture of one of the kids’ faces, and I said ‘curly hair, skinny face.’ That was him, in the passenger seat, up front. But when I got shot, he was in the back seat,” said Bowman. Another incident happened that same night, but this time in east London. Police say a Dodge Caravan was parked on Edmonton Street, and the occupants were seen firing a pellet gun at a residence. And a little later that evening, police say a fourth such incident took place involving a pedestrian shot by a pellet. A location was not reported in that incident. London Police Const. Matt Dawson says police are investigating all four suspected pellet gun shootings, and taking them seriously. “If you’re walking down the road, or you’re operating a motor vehicle, and someone points what appears to be a firearm at you, regardless of whether it’s a pellet gun or not, that’s pretty serious, and people don’t know the difference. Again, that causes great concern for us and for the community,” said Const. Dawson. “There’s the off-chance that it causes a collision when you’re talking about someone shooting a projectile from one vehicle towards another,” Const. Dawson added. Western University sociology professor Kaitlynn Mendes says it’s important to pay attention to whether drive-by pellet gun shootings becomes a social media trend, where teens post extreme activities on platforms like TikTok. “You know young people often feel kind of pressure to jump in with these trends and we saw two years ago the ‘devious licks’ trend, where young people were going and vandalizing school bathrooms, recording it and putting it online. So, I do think that social media is encouraging a certain amount of mischief,” said Mendes. Anyone with information in relation on the suspected pellet gun shootings is asked to call the London Police Service at (519) 661-5670 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).
