8-Year-Old Boy Dies After Accidentally Shooting Himself in Head

An eight-year-old boy from Utah has died after accidentally shooting himself with a loaded firearm left unattended in a car, according to local police.

The incident occurred Monday evening in Lehi, a city situated approximately 30 miles south of Salt Lake City.

According to the Lehi City Police Department, the boy was left alone in the vehicle while his mother briefly stepped into a convenience store around 7:40 p.m. local time. As reported by the NBC-affiliated station KSL-TV, Jeanteil Livingston, a spokesperson for the department said the child discovered the firearm under a seat in the car and shot himself in the head.

Newsweek reached out to Lehi City Police Department via online form on Tuesday for comment.

Shortly after the incident first responders were notified just before 8:00 p.m as on-duty officers nearby responded to the scene and provided life-saving procedures on the child, Livingston told KSL-TV.

The child was then transported by ambulance to a nearby hospital and later was flown by helicopter to a different hospital. However, he succumbed to his injuries on Tuesday morning.

Authorities have classified the incident as an “unintentional and self-inflicted” shooting, and the specifics of the firearm’s safety mechanism remain unclear as investigators are still working to determine whether it was engaged at the time of the incident.

Witness Doug Shields, who was refueling his vehicle nearby, told KSL-TV of the moment when he heard a gunshot and rushed to the scene, where he said he overheard the mother saying that her son had found the gun under the seat.

“And then she goes, ‘He shot himself, he shot himself, he shot himself,'” Shields said. “And I first thought suicide, and she goes, ‘He found the gun under my seat and pulled the trigger.’ It apparently was an accident. It was a total accident.”

As of now, no charges have been filed against the mother involved, but the investigation remains ongoing.

Monday’s fatality follows another similar incident in Utah involving a 5-year-old boy who fatally shot himself at his home in Santaquin, about 65 miles south of Salt Lake City, on Thursday. These back-to-back incidents have intensified discussions surrounding child safety and firearm storage laws in the state.

Currently, Utah does not have a law that penalizes individuals for failing to secure an unattended firearm and leaving such weapons accessible to unsupervised minors.

Additionally, the state does not mandate specific storage requirements or the sale of locking devices with firearms, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Since the start of this year, at least 166 children aged 0-11 have been killed by firearms with 391 injured, according to the Gun Violence Archive.The number of gun violence-related deaths throughout recent years has also prompted calls for Congress to strengthen national gun laws, as gun control remains a tensely divided matter in the United States.