A three-year-old girl playing with her four-year-old sister allegedly found a loaded gun and accidentally shot her older sister, killing her late on Sunday, March 12, police said.
The sisters were inside the bedroom of an apartment in Houston, where they lived with both parents, when the tragic incident unfolded at around 8 pm.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said that while the children were playing unsupervised in the bedroom, family members, all adults, and their friends, were socializing in the living room.
According to the Sheriff, each of the parents thought the other one was supervising the kids, in effect leaving them in the bedroom alone for a while.
The three-year-old picked up a loaded gun and, thinking it was a toy, fired it.
The people in the house told the police they heard a single gunshot and immediately ran into the bedroom, where they found the four-year-old girl on the floor with a gunshot wound and unresponsive.
Her family instantly called 911 and, when responding officers arrived, the four-year-old was pronounced dead at the scene.
Speaking to reporters outside the home, Sheriff Gonzalez said that it appeared to be yet another tragic story of a child accessing an unsecured and loaded firearm and unintentionally hurting someone else.
The Sheriff said that the District Attorney’s Office will determine whether any of the adults in the home would be held responsible and charged.
The investigation is still ongoing, but according to the Sheriff, someone would likely have to be held accountable for the unsecured firearm which led to the death of a child.
Sheriff Gonzalez called the shooting a “tragic and preventable” incident and urged gun owners to take all necessary measures to secure their guns, especially when children are around.
Earlier this year in Newport, Virginia, a six-year-old boy shot his elementary school teacher in the classroom.
Between 2015 and 2020, the U.S. witnessed 2,070 unintentional shootings committed by children under the age of 19, resulting in 765 fatalities and over 1,300 injuries. Thirty-nine percent of the shootings involved shooters who were younger than nine years old. The U.S., unfortunately, leads the world in firearm-related injuries and it is devastating that such a large portion of the victims are children.
