3-year-old girl fatally shot during road rage incident, police say

The girl was with her mother and three siblings, aged 1, 2 and 4, when they nearly collided with another vehicle around 8:30 a.m., WISN reported.

The driver of that vehicle then started shooting at the woman's car, striking the toddler before fleeing. Police chased the suspect, who crashed his car and tried to run before he was caught and taken into custody, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. He has not been identified.

WITI reports, assistant Milwaukee Police Chief Ray Banks made an emotional plea to the community in the wake of the shooting:

“This can’t become the norm. Our city is better than this. We need everybody to understand just how tragic this is. She’s 3 years old. How can we allow our community to continue to take these kinds of stories and no one cares? No one can protect our children unless we all, the whole community, does so. Someone takes it upon themselves to shoot at a whole car of children. ... The whole community is losing. This is not a police thing. This is something that involves everybody in the community, and we all should be upset about this. Yeah, we got the guy in custody, but if our community has gotten to the point where we can get angry over a traffic accident that we start shooting at kids in a car, and we have a 3-year-old dead … Every one of you should be as angry and upset about this as I am. She had her whole life in front of her over a traffic incident. That’s what we should be talking about. How do we prevent any other family from having to deal with this type of situation? We’re consistently burying our children. That is not supposed to happen. A parent is not supposed to bury their children. Our community is better than this. I wish there was a simple answer to this, but I do know this is not going to be just about the Police Department. This is going to involve all of us. We cannot allow people to have these guns out there, randomly shoot because the worst thing that can happen when that happens just happened this morning. … I’m sorry for getting emotional about this, but it just hurts to see and know that there’s a family having to bury a 3-year-old child again in this city. When is it going to stop? We are doing our best to try and get in front of this, but this takes more than just us. The community has to reach out and try to help us, as well."