Pregnant woman shot twice
Police searched Tuesday for a suspect in the shooting of a pregnant woman who was shot twice in a car outside a house on Bay Street, a police spokesman said.
After being hit about 12:40 p.m., the woman drove a few blocks to Choctaw Drive and Scenic Highway and called police, Cpl. L’Jean McKneely said. The woman was taken to a local hospital.
Police had the house where the shooting occurred at 2025 Bay St. surrounded for a time but did not find the shooter inside.
Police did not name a suspect but the victim, Kayla Atkins, 23, had reported previous incidents of domestic violence.
McKneely confirmed the shooting appeared to be domestic in nature.
Rosalyn Crump, 48, said her daughter, who is four months pregnant, was shot in the neck and is in stable condition.
“She’s talking and everything,” Crump said. “She’s responsive.”
Crump said her daughter had a rocky relationship with her estranged husband, Frank Atkins, from whom Kayla Atkins was recently separated.
According to court records, a temporary restraining order was issued Monday that required Atkins, 25, to stay away from Kayla D. Atkins.
Kayla Atkins said in the petition for the order that her husband tried to kill her Sunday morning and had been violent toward her on several previous occasions.
“He got behind me and put his right arm around my neck and pulled me to the ground,” Kayla Atkins said in the order about Sunday’s incident, which happened at her husband’s grandmother’s house at 2025 Bay St. “I heard people saying ‘She dead. Let her go.’ ”
Someone pulled Frank Atkins off of Kayla Atkins, who ran to her truck and eventually got away.
Frank Atkins was arrested and booked into Parish Prison on a count of domestic abuse battery. He was released the following day after posting a $7,500 bond.
A little more than a month earlier, on May 2, Kayla Atkins filed a petition for a restraining order against her husband, saying he beat her, pulled a gun on her and told her he would kill her if she ever left him.
A temporary restraining order was issued that day, however, it was dismissed May 3 at the request of Kayla Atkins.
According to court records, Frank Atkins also had been arrested on a count of second-degree murder, but that charge was dismissed last week. He had been accused of killing Bernard Lands, 51, in a drug-related dispute last year.