SOUTH BEND — Standing on his front steps, Brandon Carter on Monday described 6-year-old Trenton Jackson, a neighbor boy, as polite and well-behaved, even a bit of a flirt.

"He is a big flirt," he said. "He loves my wife."

The 27-year-old had just finished showing a reporter where two bullets had struck his home early Sunday during a drive-by shooting that injured Trenton and his 38-year-old father, Ralph Johnson of South Bend.

According to South Bend police, Johnson was dropping Trenton off at his mother's home in the 600 block of Pennsylvania Street about 12:40 a.m. when four men in a dark-colored mini-van drove pass and fired several shots, striking Trenton in the back.

The suspects fled west on Pennsylvania, police said, but then turned around and fired several more times, striking Johnson in the leg as he was loading his son into the car to drive him to the hospital.

Police believe the incident is connected to a shooting about five minutes earlier outside a home in the 100 block of East Milton Street that left an 18-year-old woman seriously injured.

The woman, identified as Jamie Peterson of South Bend, was attending a party with about 50 other individuals when several shots were fired into the crowd, police said.

No suspects have been identified in the shootings, but a vehicle found behind the Milton Street address that police believe might have been driven by the assailants was impounded.

The two locations are slightly less than a mile apart.

Carter said he spoke with Trenton's mother on Sunday, and that she said both Trenton and his father were doing well. The bullet that struck Trenton missed the boy's spinal column, he said she told him.

Peterson's condition is not known.

No one answered the door Monday at Trenton's home, where two children's bikes lay on the porch.

A next-door neighbor, Lourdes Silva, said Trenton and two other children, a boy and girl, live at the home with Trenton's mother and another person.

"The kids are very good kids," she said of the three children. "They are excellent, but they are just babies, not even pre-teens yet."

In a news release issued Monday, South Bend police spokesman Capt. Phil Trent said both shooting incidents "involved a tremendous disregard for life and property."

On Pennsylvania Street, three occupied homes, two in the 600 block (Trenton's and Carter's) and one in the 500 block, were sprayed with gunfire.

Carter said he was nearly struck by one of the bullets that hit his house. He was returning home from work when the shot

was fired, he said, and debris hit him in the face.

He said he thought it was a firework.

"All I remember was, I was coming up the steps and I heard two loud pops," Carter said.

Not until he was inside his home and heard sirens, Carter said, did he realize what had happened.

"I feel I was pretty lucky," he said.

Silva also was lucky. Gunfire missed her home entirely.

But she said the incident has her unnerved.

"I've lived here 14 years now," Silva said, "and in 14 years things have happened (in the neighborhood), but over here in this block it's been pretty quiet all the time. And now this happens after 14 years living here."

Authorities are asking that anyone with information on the shootings contact South Bend police at (574) 235-9201 or CrimeStoppers at (574) 288-STOP.

Staff writer Erin Blasko:
eblasko@sbtinfo.com
(574) 235-6187