INDIANAPOLIS — Four times since the start of 2023, the Marion County Prosecutor has pressed felony neglect charges against gun owners who were responsible for the firearms their children accessed to shoot themselves.
Three times last year, those gunshot wounds were fatal.
Last week, an east side mother was charged for her child’s self-inflicted shooting in January. The 7-year-old boy survived the gunshot wound to his stomach.
”It’s heartbreaking. And we’ve made national headlines time and time again because of these instances,” said State Rep. Victoria Garcia Wilburn, a Democrat representing Marion and Hamilton counties. ”Children, more than likely when there’s a firearm unsecured in their home, are going to injure another family member, most likely a sibling.”
Garcia Wilburn co-sponsored an unsuccessful bill in this year’s General Assembly to charge a gun owner with felony neglect if their firearm falls into the hands of a child because it wasn’t properly secured and the weapon was later used to cause bodily injury or death.
”Nobody is being held accountable and this piece of legislation is very sensible,” she said. “If you’re the adult in the home, just as we ask you to lock up toxins and poisons and your medicine cabinet, we’re asking you to lock up your firearm.”
Mario Massillamany is a former Marion County deputy prosecutor now in private practice as a defense attorney in Fishers.
”We felt that by publicizing the criminal offense you could be potentially charged with, it made people be more aware to secure their guns and make sure that their kids weren’t able to get ahold of them,” he said. “But for the neglect of that parent, that child would still be alive, and so somebody needs to be held accountable for that neglect.”
On Granville Court in January, IMPD detectives recovered six more guns on the property, three of them accessible by children, and reported that the mother was told by the Department of Child Services in 2020 that she needed to do a better job of securing her weapons and did not.
”As a defense attorney, I would look to make sure that my client had done steps such as educating the child of the dangers of having a gun and then what proper mechanisms and procedures they took to make sure that gun was secure,” said Massillamany.
In the Noblesville West Middle School shooting in 2018, a 13-year-old shot a classmate and a teacher with a gun he brought from home.
While that firearm had been secured in a gun safe, police found the keys to the safe dangling in the lock.
Prosecutors are sometimes reluctant to file criminal charges against an adult who may already be devastated by the firearms injury of a child in their custody.
”It’s probably the most unimaginable grief,” said Garcia Wilburn. “I can’t imagine it’s a grief you ever heal from. And so if the life of the children in your home are that meaningful to you, we’re asking you, as an adult, as a responsible gun owner, to make sure that the unimaginable would never happen.”
”There is a responsibility that comes with the right to bear arms and that is to make sure you keep your gun safe and secure,” said Massillamany. “We need to make sure that parents are held accountable when they’re not doing that.”
Today, jury selection began in Michigan in the case against James Crumbley, father of Oxford High School shooter Ethan Crumbley, who killed four classmates with a gun his parents bought him in November of 2021.
Last month, Jennifer Crumbley was found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter for her role in making the gun available and not exercising care for her son leading up to the killings.
