Details of what happened inside the vehicle are unknown. The boy’s mother was apparently not inside when the shot was fired.
An 8-year-old boy died after accidentally shooting himself with a loaded gun that was in a car while his mother was inside a convenience store in Utah, police reported.
According to a statement from the Lehi City Police Department, the boy was transported to the hospital in extremely critical condition.
The official information indicates that the child was alone in the car around 7:40 p.m. on Monday in Lehi, a city about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City, when he shot himself in the head.
The boy was initially taken to a local hospital in extremely critical condition. He was later airlifted to a hospital in the north and passed away on Tuesday morning, according to the police.
The shooting appeared to be “unintentional and self-inflicted,” the police said in a statement.
The gun was under a car seat, according to Livingston. Investigators are unsure whether the safety was ever engaged, he added.
Doug Shields, who was fueling his vehicle at the time, said he heard the gunshot and then saw a woman screaming. He went to the car where the incident occurred and heard the mother say that the child had found the gun under the seat.
This tragic incident happened less than two weeks after a 5-year-old boy in Utah died after accidentally shooting himself with a gun at his home in Santaquin, which is about 65 miles south of Salt Lake City.
According to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Utah has no law penalizing someone for failing to secure an unsupervised firearm and leaving it accessible to a minor. The state also does not require that unsupervised firearms be stored in a specific manner, nor does it mandate that a locking device be sold with a firearm.
