Cops: After Woman Rejected Him, He Shot Her Baby

A California man shot a 10-month-old in the head after her mother rejected him at a house party, say police. "It should shock the conscience," Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer says of the early Sunday shooting, per BuzzFeed. The child is in critical but stable condition after bullet fragments were removed during surgery, reports the Fresno Bee. Her mother, 18-year-old Deziree Menagh, had pulled away as a man she'd met a week earlier, 23-year-old Marcos Echartea, tried to hold her hand at the party. She then rebuffed his attempt to have her sit on his lap, says Dyer. "It was very apparent that he wanted a relationship with her." Around 4am, Menagh departed with her child and a male friend, but police say Echartea walked quickly toward their car and fired three shots into the driver-side window.

Fayth Percy, held by her mother in the front passenger seat, was struck in the side of the head, and Dyer says she likely would have been killed if the window were down. The surgery "went OK, but the brain is swelling," a family friend tells KSEE. Echartea, arrested at the scene, "didn't seem to care or it didn't phase him," Dyer says, per People. Echartea was booked on three counts of attempted murder. He's also expected to face charges of felony shooting into an inhabited dwelling and assault with a deadly weapon related to a May 27 shooting "over a female." Dyer says Echartea fired multiple rounds into a house inhabited by his ex-girlfriend's boyfriend, with one landing within a foot of a 1-year-old. (More shooting stories.)