news-record.com

CHARLOTTE (MCT) -- Three teenagers were jailed Thursday, police said, after one of them fired at two students as he tried to rob them at a school bus stop in northern Charlotte.

Two middle school students were waiting for their bus in the 4900 block of Sunset Road around 8:40 a.m. when 16-year-old Andre Ashley approached them, according to Charlotte-Mecklenburg police.

Ashley pointed a handgun at the girls -- ages 11 and 13 -- and then demanded their belongings, police said. It's unclear what he might have been trying to steal.

The girls refused, police said, and then Ashley fired shots at them as he ran away. Neither of the girls, who attend Ranson Middle School, was injured.

Police said they soon apprehended Ashley at a nearby Super 8 Motel on Sunset Road, where he was staying with two other teens, Kaesaun Kirkwood and Nathan Soto.

Kirkwood, 18, and Soto, 17, were also arrested, police said, because they helped Ashley hide his handgun, along with another gun, as officers arrived at the scene.

Ashley is charged with two counts each of attempted robbery with a dangerous weapon and assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill.

Kirkwood and Soto are charged with being an accessory after the fact to a felony.

The shooting comes only a day after someone fired a BB gun at a Devonshire Elementary School bus on Barrington Drive in east Charlotte.

Police are still searching for the suspect in that incident.

Records show Ashley was arrested Sept. 6 and charged with misdemeanor possession of marijuana, giving fictitious information to an officer and driving without an operator's license.

Kirkwood has twice been charged with assaulting a school employee, but the disposition of those cases weren't immediately available Thursday. In January 2010, he was charged with assault inflicting serious injury, but the charge was later dismissed.