Maria Roman says gunfire struck her South Gastonia home around 3 a.m. on Oct. 21. She described about two dozen shots, with bullets passing through the front door and living room before exiting through the back door. Her children were not home; Roman said she believes they would have been killed if they had been there.
A Mother Left Shaken and Searching for Answers
In an account reported by WBTV, Roman said she wants more direct communication from the Gaston County police detectives investigating the shooting. She has asked them to contact her, meet her at the house and explain what they have learned.
Roman says she no longer feels secure at home: even sitting on the front porch with a cup of coffee makes her fear that whoever fired the shots could return and hurt her or her children. She plans to move out, saying she does not feel safe in the house.
Hoping for Mistaken Identity, Bracing for the Alternative
Roman hopes the shooting was accidental or a case of mistaken identity, rather than an attack on her family. She wants whoever fired the shots to tell her if the wrong home was targeted. If her family was the intended target, she wants the person responsible to face consequences.
WBTV reported that it had asked Gaston County police for comment and was still awaiting a response. Roman says she wants detectives to give her a clearer account of the investigation’s status.
Part of a Troubling Stretch of Gun Violence in Gaston County
Roman's ordeal comes amid a string of shootings that have rattled the area in recent weeks. Two days before gunfire hit her home, a 68-year-old woman named Pamela Shanks was fatally shot while sitting on her back porch at the Dwell Townhomes on Hillgate Avenue in Gastonia, according to a separate WBTV report. Police said Shanks was not the intended target of the gun violence that killed her, and as of that report no arrest had been made. Investigators said they were still searching for the shooters and trying to determine who the intended target actually was and why.
Neighbors near the Shanks shooting told the outlet they heard several shots and saw multiple young people run away dressed in black, though police had not confirmed those details. Weeks earlier, on Sept. 10, a shooting inside a home on Forbes Road near Highway 321 left two people dead and two others with life-threatening injuries, per wbtv.com. A 911 transcript obtained by qcnews.com captured the chaos as it unfolded, and police later identified the two victims who died at the scene as 50-year-old Victoria “Heather” Moore and 38-year-old Megan “Josiah” Bumgardner. Police said the four people involved in that shooting knew each other and described it as an isolated incident, and they identified a person of interest without publicly naming them.
What county data show about firearm homicides
The North Carolina Violent Death Reporting System reports that firearms were involved in 75.7% of homicides in Gaston County from 2014 through 2023, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. That decade-wide share does not show how firearm-homicide rates changed in recent years or how Gaston County’s rate compares with North Carolina’s.
For now, Roman is left without the answers she's seeking, preparing to leave the only home she had there while Gaston County detectives continue piecing together what happened in the dark early hours of Oct. 21.
