The quiet of an ordinary Wednesday afternoon was shattered when gunfire erupted in the 1000 block of South Center Street in Hickory. Local law enforcement responded to the incident on September 3, where according to the Hickory Police Department, they found two juveniles caught in the chaos, one of them with a gunshot wound.
It was 3:40 p.m. when the calls came through, pushing officers to the scene at 1061 South Center Street. Confronted with the aftermath, the officers found that although two juveniles reported being shot at, it was a 14-year-old who bore the brunt of the violence, suffering a non-life-threatening injury from the gunshot. Running from the scene, the injured juvenile was quickly scooped up and rushed to the hospital, greeted there by the care designed to pull bodies back from the brink.
There is little known about the circumstances leading up to this violent act. Still, it has left a young person with the kind of scars that the sterility of a hospital cannot heal—the kind that etch themselves into the psyche. After a round of treatment that proved less dire than what bullets often write into young skin, the juvenile was released, their return to the world outside the hospital walls met with the relief that at least this time, the outcome had not been worse.
