An 8-year-old boy died after accidentally shooting himself with a loaded gun left in a car while his mother was at a Utah convenience store, police said.
The boy was alone in the car around 7:40 p.m. Monday in Lehi, a city about 30 miles (50 kilometers) south of Salt Lake City, when he shot himself in the head, Jeanteil Livingston of the Lehi Police Department confirmed to CBS News. The incident happened in a vehicle in the parking lot of a Maverick gas station, police said.
The boy was taken to a local hospital in extremely critical condition. He was then flown to a northern hospital and died Tuesday morning, police said.
The shooting appears to have been “unintentional and self-inflicted,” police said in a statement.
The gun was located under a seat in the car, Livingston said. Investigators do not know if the safety catch was on, she added.
Doug Shields said he was gassing up his vehicle when he heard the gunshot and then a woman screaming. He went to the car where it happened. He told KSL and KUTV he heard the mother say the boy found the gun under the seat.
Monday’s shooting came less than two weeks after a 5-year-old Utah boy died after accidentally shooting himself in the head with a handgun in his home in Santaquin, about 65 miles south of Salt Lake City.
Utah has no law that penalizes someone who fails to keep a firearm unattended and leaves it in the hands of an unsupervised minor, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The state also does not require that unattended firearms be stored in a certain manner or that a locking device be sold with a firearm.
No charges are currently pending against the Lehi boy’s mother, Livingston said. The shooting remains under investigation. In Michigan Last week, police charged the parents of a 9-year-old boy for violating the state’s safe storage law after their son shot himself.
In St. Louis, a 4-year-old girl died Monday from a gunshot wound while she was in a home with three other children under the age of 10 and no adults were present. Police are trying to determine who was handling the gun at the time of the shooting.
