WESTFIELD – A Cycle Street resident is facing charges after he apparently engaged in target practice from the window of his third-floor apartment, shooting across the street at bottles and cups emplaced on a fence.
A Columbia Manufacturing employee called the emergency dispatch center at 9:56 a.m. to report that a glass front door of the office was struck by an apparent BB or pellet.
Officer Patrick Shea responded and spoke with a maintenance worker who said that somebody had been shooting at bottles lined up on a fence owned by the company and he looked up to see a person with a rifle in an open window as he cleaned up the bottles and broken glass. He said that the man “gave him the hairy eyeball” when the saw him looking at him.
The office worker who had called police said that she had heard a noise and investigated to find a BB sized hole in the glass front door. The officer noted that the hole was in a clear line-of-sight from the window in question.
Shea reports that as he entered the apartment building he heard a noise as if from an air rifle and heard two persons talking about a BB gun as he approached the relevant apartment.
The officer reports he observed a woman he recognized from previous encounters and her son leaving the building and, when he knocked on the door of the suspect apartment, a man who is often associated with the woman answered it.
The man readily admitted that he owned an air-powered BB rifle and had been shooting out his windows at bottles and cups set up across the street.
The man showed Shea a BB rifle with a scope and, when asked, rightly asserted that no Firearms Identification Card is necessary to own the rifle which he said he bought at a Springfield Road department store.
The man also said, in response to Shea’s question, he has never taken a firearms safety course.
Shea reports that he seized the rifle and charged the man for malicious destruction of property, discharging an air rifle on a public way, disorderly conduct and, since the man’s companion’s son had been present, reckless endangerment of a child.
The Department of Children and Families was notified.
