In the 911 tape, Marques’ frantic mother tells the dispatcher, “my son just shot himself, Oh my God, Oh My God … he’s shot in the heart.”
After hearing the young age of the child, the dispatcher asks the mother “Do you think he is beyond help or can you do CPR?”
“I don’t know, Oh, my God,” the mother said.
The dispatcher told the mom to put something over the wound and to apply pressure.
“I don’t know if he is alive,” the mother says.
The mother said the boy got the gun out of her purse, which was on the kitchen table. She was putting dishes in the kitchen sink at the time.
“The gun is mine. It is in the house, I carry it in my purse, I laid it down. We just got home,” the mother told the dispatcher.
As the police officer approached the house, the mother cried to her toddler, “stay with me, stay with me.”
The dispatcher told her, “just pick him up and hold him.”
Mechelle Dockery, who lives two doors down from where the shooting happened, said she was able to view the aftermath of the tragedy from her backyard.
Dockery said she saw the mother run out of the apartment with a phone in one hand and her son in her arm. She said she could hear the mother sobbing and screaming to someone on the phone, “He shot himself. Oh my god, he shot himself in the chest!”
“It was really horrible,” Dockery said. “I just kept praying for him.”
Dockery said the child was lying on the ground when paramedics arrived and they immediately started treating him. She said the mother was very “distraught and hysterical.”
The child’s mother was put into an ambulance at the scene and was taken away for unknown reasons.
The death of the 3-year-old comes barely a week after 14-year-old Gabriel E. Mejia, of Pleasant Avenue in Hamilton, was shot in the head while he and a 16-year-old boy were playing with a gun. The 16-year-old, of Cincinnati, was arraigned Thursday in Butler County Juvenile Court on a felony charge of reckless homicide.
The two tragedies are a sobering reminder of can happen when guns wind up in the hands of children. Two children die almost every week, or up to 100 every year, in unintentional shootings, according to a 2014 study by Everytown for Gun Safety. The group examined every public reported case of a child gun death from Dec. 15, 2012, through Dec. 14, 2013.
The researchers found that some 70 percent of the deaths identified in their study could have been prevented if the guns had been stored, locked and unloaded in the homes.
Hamilton Officer Kristy Collins, who leads the Safety Town program for 4- and 5-year-olds in the summer, said in recent years the program has addressed gun safety, after a suggestion from a parent.
“Basically we tell them if they see a gun at home, at someone else’s home, don’t touch it, put your hands up and tell an adult,” Collins said. She added it is never too young to hammer the message home.
“I started talking to my daughter about it when she was two,” Collins said.
The 16-year-old involved in the June 3 fatal shooting of Mejia appeared Thursday before Butler County Juvenile Judge Kathleen Romans for his arraignment on charges of reckless homicide, tampering with evidence and discharging a gun in the city limits. He is housed in the Butler County Juvenile Detention Center awaiting trial.
Reckless homicide is defined by law as causing a death with “perverse disregard for the safety of another,” according to Butler County Prosecutor Michael Gmoser. There is evidence the 16-year-0ld had shot the .22 caliber semi-automatic handgun before and was familiar with the weapon.
But, Gmoser said, given the facts of the investigation, he does not intend to request the case be moved to adult court for prosecution.
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