According to WTHR, Andrea Pennlynn Eguia was 13 years old, tall for her age, and a talented basketball player with what her mother called a bright future ahead of her. Early Saturday morning, she was found fatally wounded inside a unit at the Georgetown Apartments in the 3600 block of Bunker Hill Drive on Indianapolis' northeast side, and she later died at a hospital.
Her mother, Molly Wingard, said she had gone to sleep around 3 a.m. after finishing work, unaware that Andrea had slipped out of the house with her cousin. According to FOX59, Wingard described the night in raw terms: “She was in her room sneaking off. Left. Her and her cousin. They left. Got a ride here. And I got that phone call that my baby was shot.” She did not know Andrea had left the house until that call came.
Indianapolis Metropolitan Police officers responded just before 4 a.m. to the 3600 block of Bunker Hill Drive after a report of a person shot, according to a separate FOX59 report. Officers found a teenage girl with gunshot wounds at the scene and transported her to an area hospital in critical condition; she later died of her injuries. As of an Oct. 24 update from the IndyStar homicide tracker, the teen's name had not yet been released publicly, though she was later identified by her family as Andrea.
A Move Meant to Keep Her Children Safe
Wingard's family had relocated from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis less than a year before the shooting, a move she said was meant in part to protect her son from the streets. She had installed cameras around the family's former home in Fort Wayne to keep watch over her kids, but had not yet done the same at the new Indianapolis address, according to WTHR. Now she says she wants other parents to install cameras around their own homes to monitor their children.
Andrea's aunt, Marina Bontempo, pushed back against anyone who might question her sister's decision to sleep after a long shift while her daughter was out of the house. Bontempo told WTHR that Andrea had spent time at her house since infancy and had a supportive family surrounding her, including her mother, aunts, uncles and siblings. She affectionately called her niece “Pooders.”
Prior Police Calls to the Complex
Public police reports documented multiple prior trips to the Georgetown Apartments, including a shots-fired call less than a month before Andrea was killed. As reported by Fox 59, on October 1, officers recovered three magazines along with several spent and live rounds from inside an apartment there. IMPD had also made other runs to the complex on reports of guns and was familiar with a woman who lived there from past domestic-violence calls, the station reported.
The Georgetown Apartments have separately drawn resident complaints about mismanagement, abandoned and boarded-up units, and squatting since the Indianapolis Housing Agency entered a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in winter 2025, per the FOX59 account. Police have not shared suspect information or identified a motive for the shooting.
Family Rejects Blaming the Neighborhood
Despite the complex's troubled history, Andrea's family placed responsibility squarely on whoever pulled the trigger rather than on the apartment complex or the neighborhood around it. Bontempo said the shooting was caused by the person responsible, not the place where it happened, and the family argued that the burden for youth gun violence lies with children who take up weapons in the first place.
Bontempo also pointed to a broader cultural problem, saying she believes a culture discouraging kids from telling adults when something is wrong may contribute to situations like this one. She was sharply critical of parents who allow children between roughly 13 and 16 years old to have access to guns at all.
Part of a Troubling Citywide Pattern
Andrea's death adds to a pattern that has alarmed Indianapolis officials for months. By May 27, the city had recorded its fifth teen homicide of 2026, according to IMPD records cited by WRTV, alongside 23 nonfatal teen shooting victims, slightly more than the 22 recorded at the same point in 2025. IMPD Chief Tanya Terry noted that even as overall homicides and nonfatal shootings had decreased compared with the prior year, youth shooting victims and youth homicides had risen.
That divergence stands out against the city's broader crime trends. Indianapolis recorded 133 murders in 2025, a nearly 45% drop from the record 241 murders logged in 2021, according to WFYI. Statewide, firearms were the leading cause of death among Indiana residents ages 1 through 17 in 2024, and Indiana ranked 17th in the nation for its gun death rate that year, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
Family Vows to Keep Saying Her Name
Both Wingard and Bontempo insisted that Andrea did not deserve to die simply for being a teenager who snuck out one night. Wingard said her daughter was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and the family says it still does not know who killed her. They say they intend to keep saying Andrea's name and to keep pushing for justice as the case remains unresolved.
For now, Andrea is remembered by her family as joyful, tall and gifted on the basketball court, a girl with a future that was cut short in the early hours of an October morning. Her family has said they will work to keep her memory alive, describing her, in Wingard's words, as forever 13.
