The father of an eight-year-old boy was arrested Sunday, June 26, after his son fatally shot a one-year-old girl, Kacey Bass, and wounded Bass' two-year-old sister using a gun he left in a closet unattended, authorities announced.
The shooting happened on Saturday night in Pensacola. Investigators alleged the father, Roderick Dwayne Randall, attempted to cover up the incident by removing the gun and the suspected drugs from the room before calling authorities to the scene, ABC News reports.
Randall was arrested on charges of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, tampering with evidence, culpable negligence, and failure to safely store a firearm.
The boy played with his father's gun
The incident happened in Lion Motel at 3100 block of Martin Luther King Driver in Pensacola, Florida. Randall was at the hotel with his girlfriend and four children: Randall's eight-year-old son, the girlfriend's one-year-old daughter, and her two-year-old twins, Law and Crime says.
According to Escambia County Sheriff Chip Simmons, Randall left the hotel but left his firearm in the closet, which he may have thought was a safe holster. His eight-year-old son, however, knew where he kept the gun. He pulled the gun from the holster, started playing with it, and fired a round into the one-year-old toddler, killing the baby. The bullet went through the toddler and hit her sister. A third child in the room, the twin of the injured girl, was unharmed. The injured two-year-old is recovering.
The one-year-old baby and the toddlers were sleeping in the hotel room when their eight-year-old brother shot them.
The sheriff said that the shooting was incidental.
The father returned to the hotel room after the shooting. Simmons alleged that he removed the gun and a bag of a suspected drug before returning to the room.
The victim's mother said that she was sleeping on the couch and did hear the gunshots, the arrest report stated.
Per Yahoo! News, Randall was legally prohibited from owning a gun as he had prior felony convictions. He spent five years in prison in 2001 for cocaine sales and possession charges. In 2005, he was sentenced to a year for resisting arrest without violence and a 40-month sentence for fleeing and eluding law enforcement.
Randall was booked into Escambia County Jail on Sunday morning and released on a $41,000 bond later that day. The mother was not charged in the incident.
Statistics for Accidental Gun Deaths
At the press conference, Simmons said his heart went out to the rest of the families, citing the incident as ridiculous. "This is not how we treat our children," he added.
As of February 2022, AfterMath cited that unintentional shootings affected more than 21 children, resulting in nine deaths and 13 injuries. Last year, at least 377 unintentional school shootings by children resulted in 154 deaths and 242 injuries.
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