Kiest Park (Photo by Danny Fulgencio)
Oscar Rodriguez had just finished the first mile of his regular Kiest Park run when he felt something hit the outside of his elbow Wednesday evening. When he looked down, pink paint stained his arm.
As Rodriguez ran towards Hampton Road, he noticed a dark blue pickup truck driving away from him and realized he had been hit by a paintball that was shot from the moving vehicle.
“I just kept jogging,” Rodriguez said. “I laughed and giggled… but that night I thought what if it had been a real gun?”
Rodriguez said that aside from a small bruise on his elbow, he was unharmed. Still, he couldn’t help but worry about the possibility of a neighbor being injured.
He decided to call the Dallas Police Department to ask whether or not other neighbors had experienced something similar. Rodriguez said he waited several hours for the department to return his call before he was told there had not been other reports of paintball drive-bys.
While he declined to make an official police report, Rodriguez posted a warning to neighbors on the app Nextdoor.
“Y’all be careful around Kiest Park,” Rodriguez posted. “I got hit, #mandown.”
When Nina Vargas read his post, it sounded similar to what her son had experienced just weeks before.
Vargas said her son was shot by a paintball from the window of a passing vehicle in front of her house two weeks ago. Vargas lives North of Kiest Park on Waverly Drive, and said her son was getting out of his car when he was hit.
“He still has a red mark on his stomach where they hit him,” Vargas said. “He didn’t get to see the color of the vehicle because it happened at night.”
Vargas said that while her son called the police after the incident, officers never arrived.
Rodriguez and Vargas’s son were both unable to make out who was inside of the cars that drove past them, and it is not clear if the cars involved in the incident are the same.
Dallas police were not able to confirm to the Advocate whether or not they had received reports of paintball shooting in the Kiest vicinity.
If you have experienced a paintball incident, please reach out to Emma Ruby at eruby@advocatemag.com.
