Terri Ellis talks about the shooting that took place at her house on North Long Street in East Spencer on Sunday morning as her boyfriend, Richard Witherspoon, daughter Brandi Ellis and granddaughter Briana Nichols listen. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

By Scott Jenkins

Salisbury Post

EAST SPENCER — Terri Ellis feels fortunate to be alive today after a bullet fired from outside her North Long Street home as she slept early Sunday barely missed her head.

That bullet traveled through two more walls and into the bedroom where her daughter and 3-year-old granddaughter were sleeping. And whoever fired it shot into the house again, through a window in the living room.

"There's a baby in this house," Ellis said Sunday evening. "Who would be so mean to do that?"

The shooting happened shortly before 4 a.m. Sunday at 509 N. Long St. Richard Witherspoon, Ellis's boyfriend, had just woken up and switched on the bedroom television. "Rambo" was on.

The TV had been on only a few seconds and Ellis had just begun to stir in its light when she heard the shots.

"I heard pow-pow-pow, that sound," she recalled.

Ellis felt bits of sheetrock fall into her hair. They came from a bullet hole about an inch above where her head lay on the pillow. The back of her left arm burned.

"But I was scared to turn over and look," she said. She feared the shooter might take aim at the house again.

"Am I hit?" she asked Witherspoon. Her arm was red. The bullet had grazed her.

A split second after Ellis heard the shots and felt the burning hot metal brush her skin, her daughter, Brandi Elllis, awoke to the sound of glass breaking and the feeling of sheetrock falling in her face.

She grabbed her 3-year-old daughter, Briana Nichols, and jumped on the floor. Brandi found her cell phone and dialed 911.

"I didn't know what to think" in the din, Brandi said. "I just grabbed her. It was my first instinct."

After entering Ellis's bedroom from the outside, the bullet had passed through the wall on the other side of her bedroom, another room at the front of the house between the two bedrooms, and the wall into Brandi and Briana's room. It made holes higher in each wall as it traveled.

Grazed: Terri Ellis looks for the spot on her arm where a bullet grazed her. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

The slug made entry holes about the size of a dime. It ripped exit holes nearly as big as a quarter.

"Imagine if that had hit me in my head," Ellis said, pointing to one of the larger holes. "I would've been at Noble and Kelsey right now."

Witherspoon was already up and running outside when Brandi called 911. He went all the way around the house and saw no one. East Spencer Officer J.M. Reep got to the house fast and performed his own search in and around the house, which sits between another house and an empty lot. No one there.

Reep and the family couldn't find the first bullet that nearly hit Ellis and they didn't know until later that a second one had hit the house.

Brandi was going through the living room and saw the source of the glass she heard breaking. A slug had come in through the window and grazed the ceiling. They found a bullet fragment on the floor behind a love seat.

Reep said the fragment was "pretty much destroyed" but was most likely a .38 caliber Special revolver round.

Reep didn't name a suspect Sunday and said he couldn't determine then whether the person who fired the shots was driving by or on foot.

However, he said, "I don't think they were right there at the house."

Ellis had her own theories about the shooting. She said it might be someone who's been in a dispute with another family member. Somebody broke the windows in her car in December and again in April. Also, someone threw cans of frozen beer through the windows on her back porch.

Too close: As Terri Ellis was sleeping on her bed when several shots rang out and a bullet entered her bedroom just over her head. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Witherspoon wasn't so sure. He figured it was "somebody just out shooting."

"She don't bother nobody," he said of Ellis. "She ain't got no enemies."

As Briana danced and sang on the front porch like nothing had happened, Brandi said she probably wouldn't sleep very well Sunday night. Ellis said she'd sleep in her own bed, "but I might have to move it."

But Sunday evening, the family was thankful.

They were thankful that Briana was with her mother, farther from harm's way, when the shots rang out.

"Usually my daughter sleeps in the bed with (Ellis), and she didn't last night, thank God," Brandi said.

Ellis said she was thankful that bullet wasn't lower, or her head higher.

"My preacher told me the angels was around me," she said, standing in her bedroom, looking the bullet hole. "I thank God. I thank God."

Reep, the police officer, wasn't disagreeing with that.

"If it had just been a hair below, it would have hit her in the head," he said. "God was definitely with her."

Contact Scott Jenkins at 704-797-4248 or sjenkins@salisburypost.com.