“I only pulled [the trigger] back a little bit,” the 5-year-old said.
A five-year-old child was accidentally shot dead by one of her best friends, police in Georgia have claimed.
Jada Willingham died on Friday when she and her friend were playing with a loaded gun they had found in the house. She was being babysat by her friend’s 68-year-old grandmother when the tragic incident unfolded.
After hearing a bang, the 68-year-ol ran upstairs to find the girl bleeding from a wound to her face, with her young friend standing beside her.
“I only pulled (the trigger) back a little bit,” the child told the grandmother, police later said.
When DeKalb County police investigators arrived around 3:20 PM, they found Jada lying on a bedroom floor, with the babysitter trying to stem the flow of blood with a cloth. The little girl was rushed to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston Hospital, but died of her injuries, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
The sitter told police that her granddaughter had shown her where she found the gun, in her parent’s bedroom. “She grabbed my hand and led me down the hall into her parents’ room and advised she located it on the floor on top of a small ammo box beside the bed,” the police report read.
The 9mm Smith & Wesson was found “without a holster, full magazine, with a round chambered,” it added. The incident report indicated the gun belonged to the girl’s mother, who is in the military.