Shooter sprays up Hammond gas station, kills 50-year-old woman who was just catching a ride home

HAMMOND, LA – A Hammond family is begging for answers more than a week after 50-year-old Patricia Sheppard was shot and killed while sitting in a car at a Chevron gas station.

Police say she was not the intended target.

Investigators say it happened around 1:15 a.m. on June 4 along U.S. 190.

A gray sedan pulled up to a pump and parked. The driver got out and went inside the store. A white sedan then pulled up next to the gray car.

Security video shows two people get out of that white car wearing masks and carrying what police describe as AR‑style pistols. They opened fire on the gray sedan while Sheppard sat in the passenger seat.

Detectives say between 70 and 80 rounds were fired into the car before the shooters got back in the white sedan and took off.

Police say that white sedan had been carjacked in McComb, Mississippi.

Investigators believe the shooters were after someone else. They say the real target had been in the gray car earlier in the night, but switched into a different vehicle without the gunmen realizing it.

Sheppard’s family says she worked at Sanderson Farms and often rode home with coworkers. That’s what she was doing the night she was killed. At home, her daughter, Brittney Richardson, flipped through her mother’s Bible and found handwritten letters Sheppard had left for her children.

“To know something like that can happen to somebody who was just a sweet person, didn’t bother anybody, you know, and just for her to be taken away,” Richardson said.

Police are now looking for two people of interest, 26‑year‑old Jarvis Steptoe and 21‑year‑old Reginald Steptoe, both from the Hammond area. Richardson says she wants everyone involved off the streets.

“As far as those guys, I do, I want them caught as fast as possible, if possible,” she said. “I know God got his hands over all of this.”