Two-year-old boy dies after taking a gun from his grandmother's purse and accidentally shooting himself in the head
Daily Mail
Fri June 21, 2019
Area: Greenville, Spartanburg, Asheville, Anderson
A two-year-old boy in South Carolina died after he accidentally shot himself with a gun he reportedly found in his grandmother's purse.
The Greenville County Sheriff's Office said Kayden John Stuber was being watched by his grandmother and aunt on Thursday afternoon when he shot himself in the head.
According to WYFF, deputies tried to aid the toddler before paramedics arrived, but Kayden died on the way to the hospital.
Sheriff's deputies received a call of a gunshot victim at a residence on Dronfield Drive around 1.35pm.
Kent Dill, of the Greenville County Coroner's Office, told ABC News that Kayden's grandmother and aunt were watching him while his parents were at work.
'Apparently, he went into the grandmother's purse that was sitting on the bed and, in some way retrieved, was handling the gun when it discharged,' Dill said.
Deputies tried to revive the toddler before EMS arrived and loaded him into an ambulance.
However, he was pronounced dead at 1.58pm on the way to the Pediatric Emergency Department of Prisma Health Systems, according to a coroner's report viewed by DailyMail.com.
'Preliminary results show the cause of death as gunshot wound of head. The manner of death is accident,' the coroner's office report read.
It's not clear if any charges have been filed or will be in the future, but an investigation is ongoing, reported WYFF.
The Greenville County Sheriff's did not immediately respond to DailyMail.com's request for comment.
A study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine found that guns were the second-leading cause of death for children between ages one and 19.
Firearm-related injuries were responsible for 3,143 deaths, or a little more than 15 percent of childhood deaths.
Researchers found that one in three homes in the US with children under 18 had a gun, and nearly half of them kept the firearm unlocked and load.
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