“God was here with me” — Port Arthur home hit by at least 50 bullets during drive by
Published 6:00 am Tuesday, September 14, 2021
A sticker marking a bullet hole is seen at a Port Arthur house. Police marked each location with a number to detail how many rounds were fired. (Monique Batson/The News)
|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
PORT ARTHUR — Brenda Jackson’s three grandchildren normally stay with her on the weekend. But Friday night, when her house in the 1040 block of 15th Street was shot more than 50 times, it just so happened they weren’t able to make it.
Had the 1-year-old not come down with a fever, she would have been sleeping on a pillow that now has a bullet hole behind it.
“That was in God’s plan,” Jackson, 57, said. “He didn’t want nobody to be here.”
The hole near the pillow isn’t the only one in the room, but the scariest.
Jackson’s 9- and 12-year-old grandchildren were also expected to be there. But the mother fell asleep.
“I said, ‘Lord, you knew they were coming, so you kept everyone else away. But you were here to shield me,” she said.
It was approximately 11:40 p.m. when the shooting started — about an hour after Jackson stepped out of a shower now riddled with bullet holes.
At least two guns were used in the drive-by — a handgun and an automatic weapon. The gunmen began shooting from the back of the house with the first bullets going into her Ford Fusion, and continued towards the front. The last shot that was fired came into Jackson’s room, through her bedroom door, and shattered the living room television.
She had fallen asleep by accident, but the bedroom TV woke her up. As she went to turn it off, she heard what she thought were fireworks.
“They were coming this way,” she said. “I got down on the side of the bed and said, ‘Lord please let me get to my phone before they shoot me.’”
She grabbed her phone while crouched between the bed and the closet door and called 9-1-1.
“I don’t understand,” she said from inside the house now shredded and shattered from bullets. “I told my family, and they’re so scared for me. But I’m not going to let anyone run me out of my house.”
Jackson, who has only lived in the house a few weeks, said Port Arthur Police told her the house had been targeted twice before due to a feud with a former tenant.
But now the Port Arthur woman is scared whoever is targeting the home isn’t aware that a different person lives there.
“The people that were shooting, they didn’t know God was in here with me, “she said. “God shielded me from over 50-something bullets.”
Port Arthur Police had not returned calls for information by Monday afternoon.
