CROWN POINT — After pleading guilty to aggravated battery in December for shooting and paralyzing a teen girl, a 22-year-old man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the crime.Â
Lake Criminal Court Judge Samuel Cappas accepted a plea agreement Wednesday that requires Shamar Walker to serve five years of his sentence in the Department of Correction and five years on probation. Walker has 970 days of jail credit time attributed to his sentence, prosecutors said, meaning he will be incarcerated for approximately 18 months before he can move to probation.Â
Walker shot a 13-year-old girl as she walked away from him on Jan. 24, 2020 while in the area of East 20th Avenue and Mississippi Street in Gary. He supposedly shot her after she refused to have sex with him, according to information in a probable cause affidavit. The bullet lodged in the girl's vertebrae and she was paralyzed from the chest down.Â
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The victim was discovered around midnight by a passerby in a vehicle who saw her laying on her back. She told police she could not move and complained of pain throughout her entire body. She was bleeding from a cut on the left side of her forehead, court documents show.
The girl told police she and Walker were at his sister's apartment on the 1800 block of Martin Luther King Drive when he asked her for sex and she refused. After the argument, she grabbed her bag and started walking home. He followed her and asked "why she was doing this to him." She called him a "little boy" and told him to leave her alone, the affidavit said.
She heard a gunshot and fell, hitting her head on the ground. She told police it "felt like hours" before someone came and called for help.Â
Doctors told the teen's mother she would never walk again. A few days after she was transported to a Chicago hospital for further treatment, one of her lungs collapsed and she had to be intubated, court documents show.
Prosecutors dropped charges of attempted murder, battery by means of a deadly weapon and battery with serious bodily injury in exchange for his plea.Â
