A Florida woman who is being described on social media as a “hood rat” is sitting in jail, after shooting her own daughter after arguing with a stranger, Media Take Out has learned.
Melissa Valbrum, 32, reportedly got into a dispute with someone in the parking lot of the McDonald’s in a suburb of Miami.
According to police, Melissa threatened a Lyft driver and his three passengers in the parking lot of the popular fast-food chain location just after 10 p.m. on Friday.
Police say that during the argument, Melissa pulled a gun, and allegedly threatened to shoot one of they Lyft’s passengers. A back-and-forth ensued, and during it, the gun accidentally discharged, striking Melissa’s daughter.
She later claimed to the police that it had been in her waistband, fell and then accidentally discharged. But just before it happened, surveillance footage and phone video showed the Miami woman knocking on the windows of the Lyft vehicle with the firearm already in her hand, the local police said.
“A firearm was accidentally discharged by an adult female,” Detective Andre D. Martin, a spokesperson for the Miami-Dade Police Department, wrote in an official statement. The incident is still under investigation.
Melissa’s 15-year-old daughter, who is not being named, backed up her mother’s account of events, telling the police that the Lyft passengers had, in fact, been pointing at Valbrum inside the restaurant, not outside at their ride.
Following the shooting, the daughter was taken by Miami-Dade fire rescue personnel to Jackson Memorial Hospital, which houses the Ryder Trauma Center. The bullets struck the 15-year-old girl in the shoulder, it was reported.
Melissa was subsequently booked into the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, where she now faces four counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a count of battery and one count of inflicting personal injury or culpable negligence.
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