Search on For Gunman in Fatal Shooting of Texas Teen in Marina Del Rey

Updated at 11 p.m.

A search was continuing Thursday for the person who gunned down a 17-year-old girl visiting from Texas at a shopping center in normally tranquil Marina del Rey, possibly in a botched drug robbery.

The shooting occurred about 8 p.m. Wednesday in the parking lot of the Villa Marina Marketplace mall at Midanao Way and Glencoe Avenue, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

Kristine Carman of Houston was shot in the head while sitting in an SUV parked near Jerry’s Famous Deli on the south end of the shopping center.

Police said there were at least two people in the SUV. Following the shooting, the person behind the wheel drove across the parking lot, stopping in a parking space outside a Panda Express, where Carman was ultimately found dead.

The suspect was described only as a male wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and a blue beanie, according to the LAPD. He fled the location in a dark-colored SUV, possibly heading toward the Marina (90) Freeway, police said.

Lacey Carman of Marina del Rey wrote on Facebook that Kristine was her sister. Lacey Carman wrote that she was the one driving the SUV, and that “my sister was just murdered in front of me in a robbery gone wrong.”

“There’s little room for okay or much less of anything else at this point,” she wrote, adding that her sister was “beautiful smart and undeserving.”

“I pray that God is real and holding my sisters hand right now. I pray that you never have to feel this pain or this self loathing,” she said.

Officer Drake Madison of the LAPD’s Media Relations Section said he could not confirm a report aired on KCAL9 stating that investigators said Lacey Carman’s boyfriend was in the SUV with the sisters and was trying to sell two pounds of marijuana.

Anyone with more information on the case was urged to call the LAPD’s West Bureau homicide office at (213) 382-9470, or (877) LAPD-247.

--City News Service