A 20-year-old woman was shot dead after she and her friends accidentally pulled into the wrong driveway in an Upstate New York home while they were looking for a friend’s house. The homeowner, a 65-year-old man, has been charged with murder. It happened Saturday night in Hebron, a small town northeast of Albany. Kaylin Gillis and three others were driving around the rural area with little to no cell service when they mistakenly drove into the driveway of a residence belonging to Kevin Monahan, said Washington County Sheriff Jeffrey. Murphy, the Washington Post reports. As the group realized their mistake, they began to back out of the driveway, Murphy said. Monahan came out onto his porch and fired two shots — one of which hit Gillis. None of the people inside the car got out or tried to enter Monahan’s house before he shot at them, Murphy said. “There was no reason for Mr. Monahan to feel threatened,” he added. “This is a very sad case of some young adults that were looking for a friend’s house and ended up at this man’s house who decided to come out with a firearm and discharge it,” Murphy said. He said Gillis was “an innocent young girl,” whose family he knew. “She was … taken way too young.”
After the shooting, Gillis’s friends drove five miles south to the town of Salem, where they were able to call 911. Emergency responders attempted to save Gillis, but she was pronounced dead at the scene. The incident came just two days after 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot and injured in Kansas City when he went to the wrong house to pick up his siblings. Andrew D. Lester, an 84-year-old White man, was charged. There are key differences in the two cases — Yarl is Black, and prosecutors said there was “a racial component” to his case. In the New York shooting, Gillis was White, as is Monahan. Murphy said Monahan has been charged with second-degree murder and was jailed pending a court hearing. He “was uncooperative” when police arrived at his home, Murphy said, adding it took officers “more than an hour of talking back and forth through 911 and trying to talk to him in person on the scene before he was taken into custody.