Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Accidental shootings involving kids often go unpunished
DURHAM, N.C. >> Amy Pittman learned on her first day in jail to bottle up her grief.
As soon as she arrived, guards took her shoelaces so she wouldn’t try to hang herself. Cry too much or scream too loud and she feared they would come back to take everything she had left — her clothes, a sheet, a plastic spork.
But how could she not? How could anyone? Ten weeks before, Pittman was a single mom who worked overnight shifts as a gas station cashier to keep her three kids fed and clothed.
Now, alone in a cinderblock cell, she faced criminal charges for not doing enough to protect them. She pictured her youngest, Christian, 9, in his coffin. Blue shirt neatly tucked. Cold to the touch. Dead at the hands of his 12-year-old brother, who had accidentally shot him in the back.
“Five minutes can change your whole life,” said Pittman, 38. “I wish every day that I would have stayed home.”
Children under age 12 die from gun accidents in the United States about once a week, on average. Almost every death begins with the same basic circumstances: an unsecured and loaded gun, a guardian’s lapse in attention. And each ends with the same basic questions: Who is to blame, and should the person be punished?
An investigation by the USA TODAY Network and The Associated Press found those questions are answered haphazardly across the nation.
Nearly identical accidents can have markedly different outcomes. A shooting that leads to a prison sentence in one state can end with no prosecution at all in another.
In 2015, a baby sitter in North Carolina was charged with involuntary manslaughter when a 2-year-old she was watching shot herself with a 20-gauge shotgun she found on a table. Two months later, police and prosecutors in Colorado opted not to charge a baby sitter after a 9-year-old boy was shot by his brother. The sitter had briefly left the boys unattended, and they found his loaded .38 Special in his pickup.
Grandparents in Detroit, both 65, faced manslaughter and weapons charges that could have sent them to prison for 17 years after their 5-year-old granddaughter found a loaded pistol under their pillow and shot herself in the neck. In Illinois, a grandmother pleaded guilty to a minor gun charge and received probation after a 6-year-old boy found a revolver in a bedroom closet and shot himself: “Oh my God, I killed my baby!” she screamed to police at the scene.
In the days after the April 2014 death of Amy Pittman’s son, a second-grader with thick black hair he often wore in a mohawk, the decision of whom to blame fell to Cindy Kenney, an assistant district attorney in Durham whose usual mix of cases includes murders and sex assaults against children. She said Christian’s death seemed to be no ordinary accident.
Investigators said that in addition to the shotgun that killed Christian, they found a handgun under a mattress in a bedroom and an assault rifle in the closet. They found 100 rounds of ammunition in a grocery bag, and Kenney would later tell a judge that Pittman’s underwear drawer “had more ammunition in it than it did panties.”
In a country with almost as many guns as there are people, it’s not unusual to find loaded weapons within children’s reach. One study published in 2008 in the journal Health Education Research found that firearms are present in about one-third of all homes with children nationwide. Guns in half of those homes were kept unlocked; guns in onesixth of them were kept loaded.
In that sense, the accident that killed Pittman’s son was like many others. What set it apart, prosecutors said later, was that she should have known better.
Kenney said someone had called the county’s child welfare agency to say Pittman’s children were seen chasing one another through the neighborhood with guns. A social services worker met with her, warned her that it was illegal to leave guns near unsupervised children and offered to buy her a gun safe so she could secure them. Pittman’s response, Kenney said later, was that the county should stay out of her business.
Pittman tells a starkly different story. She said she was never contacted by social services officials and insists she was unaware of the guns in her house, which belonged to her boyfriend. (Kenney said prosecutors did not charge her boyfriend because, unlike Pittman, he did not have a legal duty to keep her kids safe.) Police, prosecutors and the social services office declined to release any records about her son’s death.
Prosecutors throughout the country say deciding whether to bring charges is seldom easy. Parents are suffering, and heaping a criminal prosecution on top of that grief may not do much to teach others to handle their guns more carefully. In some cases, the decision to seek charges can cost the surviving kids their parent.
Kenney did not struggle with her decision.
“Accidents happen, but this case mandated our charges,” Kenney said. “It’s awful, you don’t bring these charges lightly, but all of this could have been prevented.”
Less than three months after the shooting, a grand jury indicted Amy Pittman on charges of involuntary manslaughter and three counts of felony child abuse. Pittman, the grand jury said, “willfully and feloniously did kill and slay Christian Pittman.”
Pittman dropped her children with their grandmother and waited at a friend’s house to be arrested. She wouldn’t see them for almost a year and a half.
Putting parents in jail
Journalists from the USA TODAY Network and the AP spent months using information from the nonpartisan Gun Violence Archive, news reports and police records to examine all of the 152 accidents from 2014 to 2016 in which children under age 12 either killed themselves or were mistakenly shot and killed by another child.
The review found that about half of those deaths led to a criminal charge, usually against adults who police and prosecutors say should have watched the children more closely or secured their guns more carefully. The rest of the time, officials decided the grown-ups had broken no laws, or perhaps had simply suffered enough. In many cases, there was little to distinguish those deaths that led to a criminal charge from those that did not.
Felons were the only exception. Because it is illegal for anyone who has been convicted of a felony to possess a gun, almost every felon involved in an accidental gun death faced criminal charges.
Even when gun accidents do lead to criminal charges, most parents and guardians still avoid prison. Pittman was one of 50 people to be convicted of a crime following the accidents the news organizations reviewed, although a few cases are pending. Slightly less than half of those people were sentenced to probation; the rest were ordered locked up, typically for about four years.
For parents and guardians who are not felons, the stark division in outcomes reflects the struggle prosecutors face after almost any accidental death.
“You feel an enormous amount of sympathy for these parents because it’s the most unimaginable loss there is when you lose a child. Prosecutors understandably struggle with the deterrent value with filing charges,” said Jennifer Collins, dean of Southern Methodist University Law School, who has studied prosecutions of negligent parents.
The same pattern plays out when children drown in swimming pools or suffocate in hot cars. Collins studied such cases a decade ago and found that about half ended in prosecutions; much of the time, prosecutors applied what she called a “suffering discount” as they looked for a balance between deterrence, retribution and mercy.
The government’s most recent official count of gun deaths, by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, identified 77 minors who died in gun accidents in 2015, but the AP and USA TODAY counted 146 for that year, including 96 in which a child either shot themselves or another child
By either measure, gun accidents account for a small share of children’s deaths in the U.S. About the same number of children die each year in hot cars and poisoning incidents. About five times as many die in fires and 12 times as many drown.
Gun accidents pose a particular challenge for police and prosecutors who must decide whom, if anyone, to hold responsible. One of the reasons why it’s so difficult is that it’s not always clear what criminal charges would accomplish. Prosecutors worry punishment won’t do much to change how other parents keep their guns. And compared with losing a child, the threat of spending a year or two in jail can seem almost inconsequential.
Casey Mercer sometimes thought about jail in the weeks after his 3-year-old daughter, Alexis, shot herself with a gun he had left on the sofa. But he didn’t fear the idea of being locked up.
“It’s hard to explain. It was already as bad as it was going to get,” he said.
Mercer kept eight firearms at his home in Lake Charles, Louisiana, midway between Houston and New Orleans. He cleaned them one morning in 2015 before leaving for work, but forgot one, a semiautomatic Glock pistol, on a couch. He texted his girlfriend, Angel Savoy, to put them away before she got home with Alexis.
In the time it took Savoy to put the family dog outside, the toddler fired the Glock through her eyelid. Alexis died at the hospital a short time later.
“It was the most painful thing you can possibly go through,” Mercer said. “I worked with the police; whenever they needed something, I was there. I was worried (about jail), but it wouldn’t have made it different for me.”
The sheriff’s investigation eventually made its way to Cynthia Killingsworth, first district attorney for Calcasieu Parish. Largely because of the text message, Killingsworth decided against any charges for Mercer or his girlfriend.
“What else can I do to those people to have this not happen again?” Killingsworth said. “We’re here to protect society. That’s our job. There’s nothing I could do from a criminal standpoint to make anything change.”
Prosecutors elsewhere have taken a different tack. In Detroit, after a series of high-profile shootings, prosecutors have aggressively sought to charge parents and guardians after gun accidents. The mere presence of an unsecured gun near children is sometimes enough for them to bring criminal charges and the threat of years in prison, assistant county prosecutor Maria Miller said.
‘I shot my brother’
The night Amy Pittman’s son died, she gave her kids chicken nuggets for dinner and told them to take baths before bed. She left her 14-year-old daughter in charge and went out to pick up one of her friends. She said she’d be back within an hour.
Pittman, with brown hair and arms covered with cartoon tattoos, speaks with a raspy, Carolina drawl. She grew up in Durham and left high school at 17 when she became pregnant with her first son. Three different fathers never played a role in parenting her four kids. USA TODAY and the AP are not publishing the names of her surviving children.