A 5-year-old girl took a big step in her recovery from a road rage shooting that put her in a wheelchair for five months.
The girl, named Ema, had her cast removed on Veterans Day and is learning to walk again after the June 30 incident.
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Ema was shot in the knee while riding in a car with her father on U.S. Highway 1 in Cary.
The bullet went through Ema’s knee and her tablet, and was found in the young girl’s sippy cup, according to the family.
“I think about how broken people are and how disconnected people are from the value of another person’s life,” said Ema’s mother, Gina.
Gina did not disclose their family’s surname out of fear for their safety.
The suspect, Charles Edward Stevenson Jr, has been charged with discharging a firearm into an occupied vehicle causing serious injury.
According to the indictment, Stevenson fired a pistol into a Ford F-150.
The June road rage incident that injured Emma is just one of at least five other road rage incidents in our area in just the past year.
NC approaches record high for gun-involved road rage incidents in 2025
Most recently, a late-night fast food run wound up with a young man being shot at in what police are describing as a road rage incident.
The Gun Violence Archive tracks road rage incidents where guns are involved.
Statewide, North Carolina has seen 18 gun-involved road rage cases this year, matching the total in 2024 and 2023.
If North Carolina gets one more case of road rage in 2025, this year will have had the highest number of road rage cases involving guns since before the pandemic. There were 27 cases in 2019.
California is the only state in the country with a specific road rage law for drivers who use their vehicles to assault another driver.
WRAL Investigates went back 20 years and found North Carolina lawmakers have never filed a bill to make road rage its own offense.
In 2017, lawmakers filed a bill where road rage could be considered an aggravating factor to give someone more jail time for other crimes, but it never got out of a House committee.
However, North Carolina is among the nine states with a law against "aggressive driving.” A driver can be charged if they're speeding and being reckless, plus do something like run a red light or pass someone illegally.
Records in the state court system show 578 aggressive driving charges were filed statewide in the last fiscal year, which is higher than the last two years but lower than pandemic rates.
Mother of road rage shooting victim urges kindness amid daughter's recovery
Gina says Emma has been keeping a positive attitude, but does fear for her safety after the road rage incident that left her with a gunshot wound.
Despite the long road to recovery and the trauma of her daughter’s experience, Gina is focused on exuding kindness in hopes that it will spread.
“Seeing all these terrible things going on in the world can really make a person want to harden their hearts and lose faith in humanity, but it is so important to instead hang onto humanity. Be the love you want to see. Bring healing to those suffering around you,” Gina told WRAL News. “Each and every act of kindness leads to another one, so there really is no act of kindness too small to help correct [the] course for what we are seeing today.”