A three-year-old boy killed his mother while playing with a firearm, Illinois area police said Monday.
The horrific death of the young woman, a tragically common incident in the USA, happened on Saturday afternoon in the parking lot of a supermarket in Dolton, a suburb of Chicago. The baby boy was in a child seat in the back of the car; the parents in the driver’s and front passenger’s seats.
Without explaining how or why, the child was found with his father’s pistol in his hands. “He started playing with it and at some point pulled the trigger,” Robert Collins, the local police chief, told AFP.
The mother, Detja Bennett, 22, was hit in the neck by a bullet. Her death was confirmed at a hospital in Chicago where she was rushed to hospital.
The father was taken into custody until it is clarified whether he possessed the weapon legally and is expected to be prosecuted, Mr. Collins clarified.
The death of the young woman adds to the frightening series of similar accidents in the country.
“Every year in the United States, hundreds of children find their weapons unsafe, stored in lockers, nightstands, backpacks, bags, or just abandoned,” and shoot unintentionally, a non-governmental organization said in a recent report. Everytown For Gun Safety organization.
The NGO, which fights, among other things, to tighten control of the firearms market and to ensure that they are stored in safe boxes, estimates that accidents that occur when guns fall into the hands of children who shoot unintentionally cost the lives of some 350 Americans each. time, on average.
Overall, firearms cause some 40,000 deaths a year in the United States, including suicides, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
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