Two guys, four guns, a farm field and a 'thousand yard stare'

Allen County, Ind. ----It may have seemed like a good idea at the time and the two gun enthusiasts probably weren't thinking about unintended consequences.

 What could go wrong driving your silver Chevy Silverado pickup truck out to the countryside and firing off a few rounds into a farm field?

Apparently, a lot. 

Both Tyshawn Chambers, 18, and Kole Mault, also 18, were charged with criminal recklessness last week and appeared in court Monday after they were caught shooting their guns into a field at South County Line and Morton roads Thursday (April 3) around 6:15 p.m.

Kole Mault

Tyshawn Chambers

Two other occupants of Mault’s pickup truck were not named in the probable cause affidavits written by Allen County Sheriff’s Department deputies Allen Miller and William Moore. They may have been minors.

Officers responded to a complaint that two guys were outside the Silverado and had fired 30 to 40 shots before getting back into the truck and heading north on Winchester Road.

When Miller passed the truck, he said he saw three occupants who gave him “the thousand yard stare” which he found “suspicious.”

Mault, the driver, told Miller that three of them had fired about 70 shots into the ground. Officers estimated it was 59 shots. There were four guns in the truck, court documents said.

Chambers agreed with Moore that the shooting was “reckless” and they should have gone to a shooting range.

What they didn’t apparently realize was that one of the guns, an Anderson style AR-15 pistol, is high-powered and travels even greater distances when aimed toward the ground into standing water. It can ricochet, increasing the bullet’s speed. The other one included in court documents was a Glock 41 Gen 5 handgun.

The field had standing water and was flat for several hundred meters up to a tree line where a home stood.

The rounds were shot with no backstop and “no concerns of where the bullets were traveling despite the residence in view,” court documents said.

Bullets shot at flat water “have a very high tendency to skip off the water and if a bullet strikes at a shallow angle with sufficient speed, it might momentarily displace the water and cause it to ricochet or skip across the surface,” court docs explained.

Both young men face Felony 6 charges and were in court Monday. As of Monday, they'd been released on $2,500 bond, according to an officer at the Allen County Jail.

They both have hearings in Allen Superior Court scheduled June 4.