A toddler accidentally shot her pregnant mother in a car park in the US.
Police reported the three-year-old girl accidentally shot and wounded her mum, who’s ‘six months pregnant’, in a car which was parked outside a Northwestern Indiana thrift store.
The shooting took place on Tuesday afternoon, (April 17), in Merrillville, as the girl, a one-year-old boy and her mum were sat waiting in the car for the woman’s boyfriend, who was inside the store, writes the New York Post.
Police revealed the man, 21-year-old Menzo Brazier, is the girl’s father, and it was he who apparently left the loaded gun in the car.
According to ABC 7 News the bullet went ‘through the seat and struck the woman through her back in her right shoulder’.
Plato’s Closet employee Hadassah Zirkle said:
We just heard screaming. We ran outside with a bunch of other people. Someone said someone was hurt and bleeding.
Another employee, Rebecca Todd told reporters she’d taken the children into the store to comfort them, revealing:
The first thought was to get the kids out of there. We grabbed them. We brought them inside, and we just tried comforting them as best we could.
Zirkle added:
He [Brazier] came outside, like screaming, asking what happened, kind of, like, disbelief on his face.
Detective Sgt. James Bogner said the girl ‘had no idea what she had done and she was very scared’.
The woman was taken to a local hospital for treatment, before being transported to Loyola University Medical Center in a ‘critical but stable condition’.
Police have not released any further information about the victim, including her name or age, but said Brazier is currently being held on suspicion of child endangerment.
The children have been placed in the protective custody of the Indiana Department of Child Services.
In April 2016, a two-year-old boy fatally shot his mother from the back seat of the car as she was driving in Milwaukee, less than two months after a Florida mum was shot and wounded in similar circumstances.
The Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office said Patrice Price, 26, of Milwaukee, died at the scene and it was the child who’d picked up a .40-caliber gun which had slid out from under the driver’s seat.
Price’s mother and one-year-old son, were also in the car at the time.
Police deputies performed CPR until emergency services arrived, but Price was pronounced dead at the scene.
Just one month before, Jamie Gilt, 31, was shot in the back by her four-year-old son who used a handgun – which had, again, slid from underneath the front seat to the back, writes The Guardian.
Putnam County Sheriff’s officials said the boy had learned how to unbuckle himself, and upon doing this, picked up the gun and fired through the front seat, hitting his mother in the back.
Gilt thankfully survived the shooting.
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