Dejah Bennet accidentally shot dead by 3 year old son at Dolton supermarket parking lot. Father admits gun that wasn’t secured belonged to him.
A 3-year-old boy playing with a gun while sitting in the family car outside a Chicago area supermarket parking lot accidentally shot his mother to death, police said.
Dejah Bennet, 22, was shot in Dolton on Saturday and pronounced dead at a hospital, police said.
The family was sitting in their car outside a Food 4 Less store when the boy somehow found the gun and fired it, striking his mother, police said. The boy’s father was in custody after saying that he owned the gun the Chicago Sun Times reported.
To date, no charges have been filed as police continue investigating.
‘This could have been prevented,’ Dolton trustee Andrew Holmes said Sunday as he visited the supermarket to hand out gun locks and speak to shoppers about the importance of gun safety. ‘All it takes is a second: unlock it, thread it through the barrel, bring it back around, put it in and lock it back,’ Holmes told WLS-TV.
Accidental shootings by children
‘We’re trying to get trauma counseling for [the child] and his family because he’s going to need it the rest of his life,’ Holmes told the Chicago Sun Times. ‘That life changed within a second.’
According to data analyzed by advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, there were 2,070 accidental shootings by children in the United States between 2015 and 2021,
So far this year there have been at least 43 unintentional shootings by children in the U.S., resulting in 16 deaths and 29 injuries.
Last year, there were at least 379 unintentional shootings by children nationwide, resulting in 154 deaths and 244 injuries, the group said.
Accidental shootings by children have risen during the pandemic, the research found, rising with gun sales across the country.
‘Children are getting these guns more often now because they roll out from under the seat, or they go in the pouch and pick it up,’ Homes added. ‘If you’re going to put them in the car, lock them down.’
