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Winston-Salem police say information should have been released earlier in shooting of top Robinson aide

Winston-Salem’s chief of police says the department should have been more forthright with information about a shooting that occurred early New Year’s Day in which a top aide to former Lieutenant Gov. Mark Robinson was injured.

The shooting took place more than two weeks ago but police didn’t provide details of the incident until late Thursday night.

Police Chief William Penn acknowledged that police should have released information about the shooting earlier. 

In a video posted on Facebook, he also admitted that officers hadn’t spoken directly to the victim, Krishana Polite.

“I prefer we had done that," he says. "However, our officers had been in contact with the mother who was right next to her. So, Ms. Polite would have had access to everything that was going on through her mother, who had been in contact with officers.”

The shooting occurred outside of St. Peter’s Church and World Outreach Center during a New Year’s Eve celebration. Polite was taken to the hospital with a serious injury after being shot but survived the incident.

Polite served as former Lt. Governor Mark Robinson’s chief of staff. Penn says the investigation is ongoing but there’s no evidence that Polite was targeted.

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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