Cleveland Toddler Shoots Baby Dead With Unattended Gun

A Cleveland baby is dead after a toddler shot him with an unattended gun.

According to Cleveland, a 3-year-old boy found the gun laying in his home on East 63rd Street. When he picked up the gun, it went off, shooting a 1-year-old boy in the head. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.

Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said investigators were trying to determine where the gun came from, as reporters gathered outside of the home in Cleveland’s East Side.

Williams believes that the person who was responsible for bringing the gun into the house and leaving it within reach of the child could face charges.

“It’s a sad day for Cleveland,” Williams said, according to the Associated Press. “This fascination that we have with handguns, not just in this city but in this country, has to stop. This is a senseless loss of life.”

While the incident is still under investigation, police said that at least one adult was home at the time of the shooting. Neighbors say they could hear the boy’s mother screaming on her porch after she was told her son had died. The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the 1-year-old boy as Braylon S. Robinson.

“This is a senseless loss of life for this city again, and it’s directly related to guns,” Williams added. “We need to really take a hard look at the things we’re doing out there on the state, local and the national level to get some of these guns out of our communities, because nothing good ever happens.”

Investigators blocked off a portion of the street with yellow tape while they interviewed witnesses and gathered evidence.

“They were really nice,” Larry Simpson, a man who lives next door, said. “It’s a shame this had to happen.”

Children having access to weapons is becoming all too common. Last month, the Inquisitr reported a similar situation where another 3-year-old boy shot his 18-month-old little brother with a.25-caliber automatic pistol.

Guns are present in over one-third of the homes in the United States. In order to protect our children, gun owners need to learn proper safety measures if they are going to keep their weapons in their homes.

Kids Health describes proper gun safety techniques:

• Take the ammunition out of the gun.
• Lock the gun and keep it out of reach of kids.
• Lock the ammunition and store it apart from the gun.
• Store the keys for the gun and the ammunition in a different area from where you store household keys. Keep the keys out of reach of children.
• Lock up gun-cleaning supplies.
• When handling or cleaning a gun, adults should never leave the gun unattended.

[Photo via Shutterstock]