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‘My Baby Didn’t Deserve This’: Mom Of 5-Year-Old Allegedly Shot By Neighbor Calls For Death Penalty
Cannon Hinnant was playing with his sisters in front of his father's home when he was shot and killed.
The mother of a 5-year-old North Carolina boy who was fatally shot, allegedly by the family’s neighbor, as he rode his bicycle said she hopes her son’s accused killer faces the death penalty.
Bonny Waddell, the mother of Cannon Hinnant, who was gunned down last week in Wilson, North Carolina, is demanding capital punishment for her child’s alleged murderer.
“I want death penalty and I’m gonna seek it,” Bonny Waddell told NBC affiliate WRAL-TV.
Darius Sessoms, the family’s neighbor, is facing first-degree murder charges in Hinnant’s death. Hinnant was playing with his two sisters, age 7 and 8, on Aug. 9 when he was shot and killed outside his father’s residence, WRAL previously reported.
“My baby didn’t deserve this,” Waddell added. “This man took my girls when he took my baby.”
The 5-year-old was transported to the hospital but was later pronounced dead, police said.
"My first reaction was he's playing with the kids," neighbor Doris Lybrand told WRAL-TV. "For a second, I thought, 'That couldn't happen.' People don't run across the street and kill kids."
Sessoms was later apprehended by the U.S. marshals.
Austin Hinnant, Cannon’s father, told detectives he had drinks and dinner with Sessoms a night before the shooting. The family said they've known their neighbor for nearly a decade.
"There wasn't anything between me and him, any bad blood whatsoever, for him to have a reason to do this," Austin Hinnant told CBS affiliate KCTV.
While a motive in the slaying hasn’t been released, investigators don’t suspect the 5-year-old’s murder is random.
Waddell said her son had “the biggest smile, the biggest eyes.”
“We lost a big piece of our family,” she explained. “He changed all of our lives. He touched everybody he knew.”
The grieving mother previously wrote on Facebook that she hoped Sessoms would “rot in hell.”
“We will get our justice and I’m taking every damn body down right with him!” Waddell said in a separate post. “I will burn this country down if it’s what it’ll take to see this man burn in hell. I’m ready to flip this county upside down.”
Sessoms is being held without bond, according to KCTV.
