NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — Louise Miller is caught in the crossfire, but refuses to leave her home of 52 years on Chesapeake Boulevard in the Ballentine Place neighborhood, even though it’s been targeted by bullets three times in a span of just 12 months.
Miller has had bullets in her refrigerator, her toilet, her walls, her family pictures. She lines one corner of the room where she sleeps with large pillows and stuffed animals. “For protection,” she says with an ironic laugh, and shows us a teddy bear with a bullet hole right behind its right ear.
The most recent shooting was the first Saturday in June, when bullets pierced Miller’s windows and her vehicles out front, but somehow not Miller herself.
“I always start my Sunday dinner on Saturday night, and I was in the kitchen,” she said, “and I guess about 15 minutes after I came out that’s when I heard this boom, boom, boom, boom boom.”
The string of three shootings in 12 months — June 2022, March of this year, and then again in June — began shortly after the killing of her great-grandson Omar Miller, just a few blocks away on Lyons Avenue.
“They rode by one morning and shot him,” she said, and then Omar died nine days later.
Miller believes a gang targeted Omar because he wouldn’t join their gang.
Meanwhile, she’s out-of-pocket $3,500 for new windows and repairs, and she’s having trouble with her homeowner’s insurance company.
“They haven’t sent me any money and it’s going on three months,” she said. “I call them and they won’t answer the phone.”
Miller said police have made two arrests, but a third suspect is still out there. When asked about the thought of moving, she said “God kept me, and if it had been time for me to go, I would have been gone.”
10 On Your Side has reached out to her insurance company to see if she can get the money that she needs for these repairs.
