Police in Chester, Pennsylvania, responded to the scene after a 4-year-old girl was shot by her toddler brother in a car outside a gas station on April 5. The 2-year-old brother was reportedly handling the gun inside the car when it went off.
People nearby heard the gunshot inside the vehicle. The girl was rushed to the Crozer-Chester Medical Center, where she was later pronounced dead.
Witnesses say the father of the two children was outside the car when the incident happened.
Despite the accident, one of the witnesses said the father was a good man.
“He was a good dude,” Theodore Crumpler said to NBC10 news. “He went to work every day. He kept his kids right beside him. It’s the number one thing that he did. Their dad was a very beautiful man.”
“He went in the store. Usually, he has someone pumping gas, which would be me or somebody else and I would watch the kids,” Crumpler continued. “But I wasn’t here today. I’m so hurt that I wasn’t here.”
According to the Gun Violence Archive, 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 most casualties reported in the site’s eight years of gathering data.
