A 23-month old baby girl was gravely wounded in a drive-by shooting last night on the Samson First Nation, 75 kilometres south of Edmonton.
A single bullet was fired from a car on the street into the kitchen of the residence. Asia Saddleback, 23 months old, was hit in the torso.
Doctors at Edmonton’s Stollery Children’s Hospital performed surgery on Saddleback but were unable to remove the bullet.
A hospital spokeswoman said the toddler remains in critical but stable condition.
No charges have been laid, but Hobbema RCMP are holding and questioning two men, aged 18 and 19 years old.
Cpl. Darrel Bruno of the Hobbema RCMP said the shooting was the latest in a rash of “firearm related” complaints that his unit has responded to in the past three weeks. Some arrests related to the incidents have been made, but not all of them have been solved.
“We’ve responded to 12 firearm incidents in the past little while, and we believe a lot of it is retaliation between the different gangs we have out here, but in this particular incident, we haven’t been able to establish that it was gang related,” he said.
