A six-year-old girl died after her mother left her in a car with an unsecured gun and four other children.
The unnamed victim was shot in the head after her mother, also unnamed, left the car unattended to get food. The incident happened just after 12:00pm on 2 March, at a shopping centre parking lot near Gratiot and Harper Ave in Detroit.
'At some point in time, shortly thereafter, one of the kids from the car ran to try to grab her but it was unfortunately a little too late,' Charles Fitzgerald, First Assistant Detroit Police Chief, toldFox 2 Detroit. 'A six-year-old girl was fatally shot in the head with an unsecured weapon.'
It is yet unclear if the victim was shot by another child in the car, or if she accidentally shot herself. Police have yet to confirm where the gun was stored in the vehicle.
'As you can imagine, mom is a mess,' Fitzgerald said, referring to the victim's mother. 'But we'll have to figure out what's going on with the weapon. Why it was there, why it was left unattended. And at the end of the day, we'll present our findings to the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office.'
'This is preventable,' he added. The report doesn't confirm whether all five children in the car were related, but none were older than 12,Peoplereported.
'We have a 6-year-old girl who will no longer go to school,' Fitzgerald lamented. 'She can't grow up to be a Detroit police officer or work for any of the media outlets. It's really, really sad, but preventable.'
He confirmed that it's the second time their department responded to similar incidents in one week. On 1 March,another six-year-old accidentally shot herselfon the shoulder with a gun she found at home.
'By the grace of God, the other injured child will recover,' Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield said in a statement. 'This is the second time in the past few days that a child in our city has been shot with a parent's unsecured gun.'
Noting a third similar incident from about two weeks prior, Sheffield said the most recent is tragic because it was an entirely preventable accident.
Source: International Business Times UK
