Girl Shot After Being Mistaken for a Skunk

Pennsylvania in recent years has had issues with skunks, so when Janet Grant from Rochester found one in her garden she was by no means surprised. Having informed her twenty-four-year old son Thomas of the skunk sighting, she held the torch beaming it on the animal, while he aimed in with a shotgun. But the sound they heard when they shot the skunk was not the normal sound, hardly surprising when it was in fact an eight-year-old girl in a Halloween costume.

The girl (Thomas’ cousin) was dressed up for Halloween, and attired in a black and white costume with a hat that had a small white tassel, possibly what the Grant’s thought was the tail.

The incident, which happened on Saturday, occurred at a party held by the Grant’s. Luckily some of the party guests were off duty nurses, and it is believed that their intervention saved the girls life.

The Grants Residence, deserted since the incident on Saturday

The Grant’s are not going to be getting off quite so lucky, while it is legal to kill a Skunk in Pennsylvania, if you do so you have to hold a furtaker’s license, there is also a law stating you cannot hunt 150 meters within your home grounds. Obviously this is not the only offense on the table, but Police have as yet been unable to talk to the Grant’s who appear to have disappeared since the girl left for the hospital.

Neighbor Dan Reese told the press that the Grant’s had not been any trouble in the past, but they had no right to shoot a weapon so close to the home. The house is located with a small isolated community, but still within only a short distance of neighboring properties.

Of course the biggest mystery will undoubtedly be how the Grant’s managed to confuse an eight-year-old girl for a skunk in the first place, an animal that usually does not grow to even half the size of the average eight-year-old.