By Nathan Hardin
nhardin@salisburypost.com
CHINA GROVE — Steven Sigmund clearly made out a figure sitting on a motorcycle Tuesday night — revving the engine and wearing a full-face helmet — before being shot through the front window of his RV.
A 9-mm bullet ripped into Sigmund’s shoulder. Part of the slug fragmented and wedged behind his right clavicle. Some of the shrapnel sliced into his left cheek.
“I don’t know who it could have been,” Sigmund said Wednesday. “I haven’t had any conflicts with anybody.”
A stranger appeared at the RV’s door about two minutes before the shooting, Sigmund said.
“I did not recognize him,” he said. “He said they called him Red.”
Sigmund said the man addressed him by name and said he knew his stepdaughter. The man then asked Sigmund if he had any drugs, Sigmund said.
“He said he knew me,” Sigmund said. “I didn’t know him. I more or less invited him to leave.”
After telling the man that he had no drugs, Sigmund closed the door and the stranger left on foot, heading toward N.C. 153.
Less than two minutes later, Sigmund said, he heard a motorcycle come from the direction the man had been walking and stop outside his Allegro Motorhome.
“Within 30 seconds of me sitting down, I could hear a motor revving outside,” he said.
Standing, Sigmund looked out the RV window and recognized a motorcycle body. Lights on the gauges shone on its gas tank.
“Within the seconds that I recognized what I was looking at, I was shot through the windshield,” he said.
Sigmund said he fell to the camper’s floor after being shot and heard the motorcycle wait for a few seconds to see if he would stand back up. The gunman then turned around and went back the way he had come into the trailer park.
Sigmund’s RV sits about 75 feet from neighbor and relative Frankie Bumgarner’s home. Bumgarner said he emerged from his trailer just in time to see the gunman speed up the dirt road toward N.C. 153. The gunman must have known the dirt trail pretty well, Sigmund said, because there are no lights in the neighborhood or along the dirt path.
Bumgarner said a similar incident had happened at about 4 a.m. Sunday morning when gunshots were fired outside the camper.
No one saw the gunman and nothing was damaged in the neighborhood, but Sigmund found four live 9 mm rounds outside his RV on Tuesday, about four hours before one came through his window.
Sigmund said investigators found the casing from the fired round.
“I found the other end,” he said.
Sigmund said he’s had a “colorful past,” but said he has no enemies and doesn’t drink or use drugs because of health reasons.
“I have a 24-year-old stepdaughter in Afghanistan and I’m at home getting shot,” he said.
Sigmund described the man who knocked at his door as being about 5-foot-8 and 150 pounds with a thin face and thin build. Sigmund said the man had a red beard and was wearing a green hat, blue jeans and a gray hoodie.
The motorcycle was described as a Honda cruiser-type with a windshield on the front.
“My biggest concern is I don’t want my daughter to come back from the war and find her daddy dead,” Sigmund said.
The Rowan County Sheriff’s Office asks anyone with information to call 704-216-8704.