The San Jose Police Department received three reports of pellet gun attacks on Friday, including one from a 15-year-old girl who was in intensive care after being shot.
Gianna Vitraelli was walking home on Monroe Street near Valley Fair Mall with a friend on Friday when she was shot in the back.
“My lungs felt compressed,” Vitraelli told NBC News. “It hurt really bad because it was hard to breathe.”
ABC 7 reported that the incident caused internal bleeding and a collapsed lung.
Vitraelli was shot at 2 p.m. on Friday. Less than a half hour before, a 42-year-old woman was hit by a pellet gun in the parking lot of Walmart at 4080 Stevens Creek Blvd., the police department told SFGATE.
Later that afternoon at 2:20 p.m. a 9-year-old girl was shot in the back near Westgate Mall, police said.
The department is actively investigating all three incidents and trying to determine whether the three are related. There is no suspect information yet.
“This could potentially be charged as an assault with a deadly weapon incident, a felony in the State of California,” police said.
Vitraelli told NBC that she thinks the attack may have been a prank encouraged by a TikTok trend where users post videos of themselves shooting people with water or gel beads known as Orbeez from air-powered guns. Police departments across the country have reported pellet gun shootings linked to the the so-called “Orbeez Challenge.” The San Jose Police Department didn’t comment on whether the incidents could be part of this social media trend.
