Father is charged in shooting of 2-year-old
A man has been charged in the accidental shooting of his 2year-old son in southeast Houston in May.
Ali Parvez Masoom, 32, was released on bail Friday on a misdemeanor charge of making a firearm accessible to a child.
The shooting happened on May 20 at an apartment at 10901 Telephone Road. Around 11 p.m., the young boy crawled onto the kitchen table and grabbed a gun that was lying there, according to court documents.
Masoom is accused of leaving the .380 semi-automatic handgun on the table without a trigger lock in place, the documents show. When the boy got ahold of the gun, he managed to pull the trigger and accidentally shot himself in the face, police said.
He was taken to the hospital in critical but stable condition.
Masoom told police that he
owns a trigger lock and usually doesn’t keep a bullet in the chamber. He said that he didn’t use a trigger lock that day, however, and forgot that there was a bullet in the chamber, according to charging documents filed with the Harris County District Attorney.
The child’s mother said she heard the gunshot but wasn’t in the room at the time.
Masoom was arrested and charged on June 30 and was released on $1,000 bail last week.
Several Houston-area children have died this year in accidental shootings.
Just Sunday, a 2-year-old Acres Homes boy died after unintentionally shooting himself, police said. The child, Christopher Williams Jr., somehow obtained an unsecured weapon inside the home on Knox Street, pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger, a Houston police captain said.
It is unclear how Williams got access to the gun, although it is believed to belong to his father. No charges have yet been filed in the case.
In February, 6-year-old Justin Gooden shot himself in the Third Ward with his sister’s boyfriend’s pistol. He had been looking for an Xbox game.
Days earlier, 4-year-old Kadren Johnson shot himself with a gun he found in his grandmother’s home in Texas City. Both of the young boys died.
On Saturday, a 4-year-old Georgia boy found a gun hidden inside his house and shot himself in the head with it, according to a newly released sheriff ’s report.
Justin Foss Jr. was pronounced dead Saturday morning after the shooting at his Augusta residence, Richmond County Chief Deputy Coroner Kenneth Boose Sr. said.
Data compiled by the Associated Press and the USA TODAY Network in 2016 found that a child was shot to death every other day somewhere in the United States, on average.
Deaths and injuries spiked for children under 5, and were more prevalent in Southern states, the research shows. Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi all ranked in the top 10 states with the highest per capita rates of accidental shootings.
In most cases of children killing themselves with guns, “it’s clear from the facts that they were preventable, and that just makes them even more tragic,” Lindsay Nichols, federal policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said Monday.
The California-based nonprofit provides technical advice to lawmakers, law enforcement, citizens and others trying to curb gun violence.