Authorities say that late on Sunday, March 12, a 3-year-old girl was playing with her 4-year-old sister when the younger girl found a gun and accidentally shot and killed her older sibling.
The sisters and their parents were in their Houston apartment, and the tragedy occurred at around 8 p.m. in the bedroom.
According to Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, all of the adults in the home were mingling in the living room while the children played unattended in the bedroom.
According to the Sheriff, each of the parents thought the other one was watching the kids, and left them in the bedroom for a while on their own.
The child, believing the gun to be a toy, picked it up and fired it.
After hearing a single gunshot, the occupants told police they rushed into the girl’s bedroom and found her lying on the floor, unconscious.
Her parents called 911 right away, and the responding officers pronounced the four-year-old dead at the scene.
Sheriff Gonzalez, speaking to reporters outside the house, said it appeared to be another tragic case of a child gaining access to a firearm that had been left unsecured and loaded.
According to the Sheriff, the District Attorney’s Office will decide if any of the adults who were in the house will face charges.
It is unclear how and why the gun was accessible to the children.
While the Sheriff has not concluded his investigation, he has said that someone must be held responsible for the unlocked gun that killed the child.
Deputy Sheriff Gonzales described the shooting as “tragic and preventable,” and he urged gun owners to lock up their weapons whenever children were present.
There were 2,070 unintentional shootings involving minors under the age of 19 in the United States between 2015 and 2020, resulting in 765 deaths and over 1,300 injuries. Children as young as nine years old were the perpetrators in 39% of the shootings. It is heartbreaking that a disproportionate number of gun violence victims in the United States are children.