Teens wanted to run away together — so he shot his girlfriend’s mom in the face, Okla. cops say
Authorities in Oklahoma say a botched triple-murder plot hatched by a teen couple ended with one of their mothers suffering a gunshot wound to the face.
Zachary Shane Sligar, 18, of Shawnee, Oklahoma, tried to go through with his part of the plot, according to KWTV. He brought a handgun to his 15-year-old girlfriend’s house late Thursday night and pointed it at her sleeping father.
He fired once but narrowly missed, sending one bullet into Sherman Crneckiy’s pillow, KOKH reported. Then he fired at Crneckiy’s 56-year-old wife, hitting her in the face and the hand, according to the station.
“He missed [the father] and he also had a malfunction with the gun,” Lincoln County Sheriff Charlie Dougherty told KWTV. “Once the plan started falling apart, [his girlfriend] tells Zach to just leave and she had come up with a story.”
Crneckiy calmly told a 911 dispatcher that he thought his wife had been shot in the face, according to call audio obtained by the Shawnee News-Star.
“We don’t know what happened,” he told the dispatcher. “We think my wife may have gotten shot in the face. We were just woken up by an explosion.”
The teen couple had planned to kill the girl’s parents and her 24-year-old sister, who lived in a separate home on the same property as her family, police told KFOR. They came up with the plan after the family disapproved of the girl’s plan to emancipate herself from the family so she could run away with Sligar and marry him, the station reported.
Sligar, who took a gun from his home, was to shoot and kill the girl’s parents, while his girlfriend planned to walk to her sister’s house and shoot with her father’s gun, according to the News-Star. She didn’t go through with her part, though, Dougherty said.
The family lives near Sparks, Oklahoma, about 55 miles east of Oklahoma City. Sligar returned to his home in Shawnee, about 20 miles south of the crime scene, KWTV reported, after the shooting, police say.
He was arrested there by task force deputies from the Lincoln and Pottawatomie County sheriff’s offices, as well as officers from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, according to jail records. He remained in the Lincoln County Jail on Saturday facing charges of attempted murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
The girl will be tried as a juvenile offender. She has not been identified by authorities.
Her mother was in critical condition at a nearby hospital Friday, but Dougherty told KFOR that the woman was expected to recover from her injuries.
This story was originally published July 21, 2018 at 8:51 AM.