A 3-year-old boy in New Jersey was critically injured this week after authorities say he accidentally shot himself with a gun.
Newark Police Department officers responded to a shooting on Thursday, Aug. 15, at around 5:47 p.m. local time inside a home on Wainwright Street near Bragaw Avenue, where Newark Public Safety Director Fritz Frage said in a statement that they found the child with two other children who were unharmed.
The young boy is now in critical condition and was taken to the nearby University Hospital for treatment.
“A firearm was recovered at the scene. The shooting appears to have been accidental and self-inflicted,” the Newark Police Department said in a statement. “This incident remains under investigation. No further information is available.”
Several minutes after the shooting, the child’s older brother was captured inside a local corner store asking for help, surveillance footage obtained by WABC-TVshowed.
The manager of the store told the outlet that the boy entered the establishment covered in blood and said his younger brother could not breathe.
After a store clerk entered the home with the older brother, he reportedly returned and told the manager, “Boss, there’s a little boy rolling around in blood,” before the manager called 911.
“I’m scared myself because we were here, but we didn’t know what was happening, but we saw all the cops and everything,” Newark resident Edith Frinpong, a local mother of two, told WABC.
“We should be careful to put weapons in our homes … in a safe place,” she added.
Shortly after the shooting incident, the Newark Department of Public Safety shared an informative post on Facebook, where it advised gun owners to be “vigilant about gun safety by taking extra precautions when storing a firearm.”
With the advisory, the department encouraged locals to keep guns “unloaded and locked up” in storage, secure ammunition “separate from the gun,” consider using a “gun lock” and hide keys or passcodes to gun storage.
“You cannot be too careful about where and how you secure a firearm, especially in homes or other locations where children may be present,” the message read, citing the “self-inflicted shooting of a child” the day before.
The shooting comes several months after another 3-year-old boy in Charlotte, North Carolina, is believed to have accidentally shot himself with his mother’s unsecured gun. He was rushed to a local hospital with life-threatening injuries, per police, and pronounced dead shortly after his arrival.
“A tragedy like this should wake us all up on understanding the importance of the responsibility we all have,” Major Bret Balamucki said at the time. “Wherever you think you may have hidden that weapon – if it’s loaded and it doesn’t have a lock on it that the child can’t defeat – then potentially they could gain access to it.”
