Man arrested after video shows child playing with gun

An Indiana man was arrested after his 4-year- old son was seen playing with a gun in doorbell camera footage that was broadcast on live television Saturday as part of a program that follows police departments.

The footage showed a child clad only in a diaper waving a gun in an apartment hallway. The child appeared to pull the gun’s trigger several times, although the gun did not discharge, and pointed it at several doors inside the apartment complex in Beech Grove, Ind., a suburb of Indianapolis.

The scene was broadcast just weeks after a first-grade student in Virginia shot a teacher with a 9 mm handgun.

In footage from the television show “On Patrol: Live,” a neighbor who had called 911 tells officers from the Beech Grove Police Department that her son had opened the door and saw the boy with a handgun, then closed the door and told his family about the child. The mother tells police that she saw the boy through the peephole and knew he was holding a real gun because she sells firearms.

Officers are then seen entering the boy’s father’s apartment. The father denies that a gun is inside and says that he had been sick and spent the day sleeping. Police leave the apartment, return to the neighbor who called 911 and tell her they could not find anything. Another neighbor then shows officers footage on her mobile phone from a doorbell camera clearly showing the boy playing with a gun in the shared hallway.

Police return to the father’s apartment and find a firearm in a desk that an officer identifies on camera as a Smith & Wesson 9 mm handgun. The father is arrested. “On Patrol: Live” said in a news release that the gun had been loaded.

Chief Michael Maurice of the Beech Grove Police Department said in an email that the boy’s father, Shane Osborne, 45, was arrested and charged with neglect of a dependent. The child was released back to his mother, Maurice said.