A two-year-old boy is in the hospital after accidentally shooting himself in the arm with a gun his father left out.
27-year-old father, Oscar Guerra, was arrested and charged with one felony count of child abuse after his son grabbed the gun from the couch in Phoenix, Arizona.
The boy’s mother told police it’s not the first time Guerra had left a gun out, and she had warned him to keep his guns secured.
Guerra reportedly took out the gun to clean it, but began watching videos on his computer and forgot about it.
Police were called around 10.40 pm on July 9, and found Guerra and his son, who was injured with a gunshot to his left arm.
The tot was taken to the hospital and has non-life-threatening injuries, police said, but Guerra is facing a prison sentence for the accident.
He said he saw his son walk into the room, but thought he had gone back to his bedroom when he heard a gunshot.
Guerra is out of jail without bail, but is facing nine years in prison if convicted.
The shooting comes months after another two-year-old shot his twin with a gun he found at home.
It’s not clear how the toddler got access to the weapon while at home on Robin Hood Lane in Hampton, Georgia.
‘It was so scary, a terrible feeling’, neighbour Melanie Pressley told local TV news station Fox 5. ‘We knew something terrible had happened.’
For hours, police searched inside and outside of the white bungalow, set back from the road, where emergency service vehicles were parked in a row.
Toy cars and tricycles were lined up near swings in the garden where children might otherwise be playing.
Such incidents are more common than you might think in the US, where guns are a leading cause of unintentional injury among children.
Five-year-old boy, Brooks Thomas Wilson, died after shooting himself with a gun he found while playing in his parents’ bedroom last August. A single shot struck him in the head.
His obituary said Brooks ‘lived his life to the fullest and always wore his heart on his sleeve’.
The month before, Nakyzi Odums shot himself in the chest in a Walmart parking lot, where his parents had left him in the car while they went to buy fireworks. He died three days later at hospital in Douglas, Georgia.
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