A girl was injured by sphere in the head in the southern US while playing hide and seek with her friends when she was shot by a man who “saw shadows” in his garden.

The events unfolded Sunday in Starks, a Louisiana town near the Texas border, the sheriff’s office said in a statement Tuesday.

Officers found the 14-year-old girl “with a gunshot wound to the back of the head.” She was taken to hospital, where she is being treated in non-life-threatening condition.

The children were playing “hide and seek in the area and hid in a neighbor’s garden,” police said.

David Doyle, 58, told officers he “saw shadows outside his house and went to get his gun.”

He then “returned and saw people running off his property. At that moment he started shooting at them and without realizing it hit the girl,” the sheriff’s office explained.

Doyle has remanded in custody and several charges were brought against him, including armed assault.

The site of the incident is a cul-de-sac with three houses: Doyle’s, the girl’s family’s house and the girl’s relative’s house.

This event is part of a series corresponding incidents that have occurred in the US in recent weeks.

In April, a 20-year-old woman was shot and killed in upstate New York when she accidentally pulled into the parking lot of a home. That same month in Texas, a man opened fire on a group of cheerleaders when they mistook his car for theirs and tried to open the door. Another African-American teenager was seriously injured by bullets when he got the address wrong and knocked on the door of a man’s home in Missouri.

In the US there are more guns than residents. Firearms are responsible for more than 130 deaths per day, more than half of which are suicides.