MIAMI _ Miami Gardens police arrested three men in Tuesday night's paintball attack that left several people injured.
Police are still investigating the paintball shooting spree that began in Northwest Miami-Dade when a man doing yard work near Northwest 154th Terrace and 32nd Avenue was pelted with paintballs, according to WPLG-Local 10.
The men _ identified by Miami Gardens police Wednesday morning as Tyrese Ferguson, Antwon Adams and an unnamed juvenile male _ then drove toward a Family Dollar store at 14400 NW 27th Ave. in Opa-locka. There, they are accused of opening fire on a man standing outside the store around 10 p.m.
That man, Jerry Watson, was struck more than a dozen times by the painful paint pellets as he ran inside the store to ward off the attack.
Watson told WSVN 7 he thought he was being shot with BB guns. "So I pulled out my little stick and hit them back, but they kept running and they kept shooting," he told the station.
Miami Gardens police later pulled over a car with the suspects near Ahmad and Peri streets.
Paintball is a competitive team shooting sport in which players in battle gear "eliminate" opponents by hitting them with spherical dye-filled gelatin capsules shot out of an air weapon powered by compressed air or carbon dioxide.
The game originated in the early 1980s and grew in popularity over the years.
Late Bee Gee Maurice Gibb, for example, loved the game. He played in leagues around South Florida and met with paintball friends for breakfast regularly at Jimmy's East Side Diner on Biscayne Boulevard to fuel up before playing. In June 2002, six months before his death from an intestinal ailment in January 2003, he opened Commander Mo's, a paintball specialty shop in North Miami Beach.
But a dangerous trend nationwide has found the game venturing outside of structured play in which "combatants" don protective gear and take to wooded areas into the streets where individuals shoot unsuspecting people, as in Tuesday's incident.
In June, for example, there were at least six separate paintball shooting incidents in Miami neighborhoods _ including Allapattah and Wynwood _ that had police searching for people attacking random individuals.
"This is a crime," Kiara Delva, a Miami police spokeswoman told the Miami Herald at the time.
If you have any information on the Tuesday night paintball shootings in Miami Gardens and Opa-locka, call Miami-Dade Crime Stoppers at 305-471-8477.
