LOWELL, N.C. — The families of two people involved in a shooting Monday night in Lowell are wondering how it got to this point.
Channel 9′s Gaston County reporter Ken Lemon spoke to those involved after a mother said her son was shot in the chest by his girlfriend.
The girlfriend, Hannah Morton, is in jail on a $500,000 bond. She was in court on Tuesday and sobbed as her father spoke up for her.
“I heard he was repeatedly hitting her in the face and busted her mouth and busted her teeth, and that’s unrespectful for any man,” said Ray Morton.
Morton objected to the bond, but the judge said it’s in line with a domestic shooting like this.
“She is the victim, she’s the one that got beat and tried to get away,” Morton said in court.
The prosecutor said investigators are still trying to determine what led to the shooting on Birch Street. They say Morton has multiple injuries indicating there may have been a struggle, but only one thing was clear: she shot her boyfriend, Justin Moore, in the chest.
Moore’s mother said Morton called her after the shooting.
“She said, ‘Yvette? I just shot your son,’ I said no, and then she said, ‘He kept telling me to shoot him, to shoot him, and so I shot him,’” said Yvette Moore.
She said Justin had surgery Monday night, and he was in stable condition Tuesday morning.
Moore told Lemon that Justin and Hannah had a troubled relationship, but questioned how it got this far.
“You don’t shoot anyone,” Moore said.
Lemon checked with the courts, but there’s no civil record of trouble between the two. Investigators spoke with Justin minutes before Tuesday’s hearing, but he told them he didn’t want his girlfriend to get in trouble.
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