A 2-year-old boy fatally shot his 4-year-old sister at a Pennsylvania gas station, authorities said Tuesday.
The children were in a car parked at a gas pump in Chester, south of Philadelphia, when the shooting occurred, the city’s police department said in a statement.
The toddler had been handling the weapon, the department said. It wasn’t immediately clear how he got it or what kind of gun it was.
Detective Rhaheem Blanden identified the children as siblings.
The girl was immediately taken to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead, the department said.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said detectives from his office were helping Chester police investigate the “absolutely tragic” shooting.
“Everybody in the community of Chester, in Delaware County, myself included, all of us are just heartbroken to think of what happened to this poor child,” he said, according to the newspaper.
Additional details about the shooting weren’t immediately available.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks shootings in the United States, 258 children 11 and younger have been killed or injured by gunfire this year.
More than 1,000 were wounded or fatally shot last year, the highest number in the site’s eight years of data.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
