US teen accidentally shoots self dead live on Instagram

A 13-year-old boy accidentally shot and killed himself live on Instagram as his friends watched in horror.

Malachi Hemphill of Forest Park, Georgia, was found unconscious by his mother Shaniqua Stephens and her daughter after they heard a loud bang from his bedroom. “I heard a big boom. I couldn’t tell if it was a gunshot or what. I just knew that it was something that was wrong,” the boy’s mother Shaniqua Stephens said.

She and her daughter ran upstairs and found him. “We kicked in the door. We found him just laying there in a pool of blood,” Stephens recounted. “My daughter screamed and said, ‘Mom turn his phone off!’ As I proceeded to look at his phone he was on Instagram Live,” she said. Hemphill was live on the social media site Instagram handling the gun when it went off. He was rushed to Grady Hospital where he died. Stephens said it was an accident and not an intentional suicide. Several of his friends were watching when the shooting happened last Monday. Stephens said they rushed to her house afterward.

She has been told that someone asked why he did not have a clip in the gun and told him to put a clip in the gun. She said it was hard to keep track of his activities on social media even though she and her husband Ernest monitored his profiles often. She said she hopes parents get the message to keep a vigilant eye on what children are doing and who they are doing it with.