DAYTON — They’re the most innocent of victims. You might think they’re too young to hold a gun, let alone shoot themselves or another child.
But a News Center 7 I-Team investigation uncovered it’s happened more than 2,000 times in the last decade. We found instances across the country and right here in the Miami Valley.
The I-Team’s lead investigative reporter John Bedell found this was just a small fraction of these tragic cases.
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The I-Team has been working for months to track just how often these shootings happen. We know there are many more than the 2,000 we found.
This count doesn’t include gang violence, hunting or target accidents, suicides, or even the thousands of other shootings where a child accidentally pulls the trigger and wounds or kills a teen or an adult.
The families the I-Team spoke with have small children who have been touched by this and want to keep other families from living their pain.
“Still knowing that she’s not there is still not real to me,” James Fairley told the I-Team. He was talking about his daughter, Nay’loni, from his home near Indianapolis during a recent virtual interview with the I-Team.
Fairley still tries to hold onto the memory of his daughter. She loved to sing with her dad. But her voice was silenced.
“She was six years old,” Fairley said. “Everything about her was perfect. She was the life of the family.”
Nay’loni was at her mom’s house near Jacksonville, Florida, in the fall of 2021. James will never forget the phone call he got about what happened.
“(Her mother) kept saying Nay’loni’s name and my heart sunk,” Fairley said. “I knew instantly something was wrong. So I kept trying to get it out of her, ‘what’s wrong, what’s wrong?’ And she told me that she shot herself.”
Medics rushed Nay’loni to the hospital, where she died from an accidental shooting.
“Nay’loni somehow that morning was supposed to be getting ready for school and she seen the gun and I guess took it to her room,” Fairley said. “She was playing with it, and the gun went off.”
Nay’loni is far from alone. News Center 7 teamed up with our sister stations around the country for a months-long investigation to document more than 2,000 accidental shootings over the last 10 years where a child 12 or younger either injured or killed themselves or another child.
“I had driven down there to the house that (my son) Jaxon was at,” Paula Layton told the I-Team. “And there was a bunch of cop cars and an ambulance.
And I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ And they wouldn’t let me through at first. And I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m the mom of the kids that live here.’ And they finally let me through, and they wouldn’t tell me anything that had happened at first. And I kind of had to pull it out of them. And then they told me that Jaxon had gotten into one of his daddy’s firearms and shot himself.”
Paula Layton’s son, Jaxon Truitt, was three years old when he died in an accidental shooting in Charlotte in 2023.
“I mean, he’s three, he’s curious, he thought it was a toy,” Layton said. “So, Jaxon found it, and unfortunately, that’s what took my son’s life.”
Kaelin Lewis’ daughter, Kendall Al-Amin, was four years old when she died in an accidental shooting in Atlanta in 2022.
“I never would have thought that I would be living life like this without her,” Lewis told the I-Team through tears. “Like, we’re supposed to be together.”
Police say Kendall found a gun under the seat of her mother’s car.
“I’m just focused on the road, just driving, just moving along and then I hear a noise,” Lewis said.
Now Lewis is facing criminal charges. “It was not intentional at all,” Lewis said. “I would never hurt my baby.”
Here in Ohio, the I-Team found at least 129 accidental shootings in the last decade where the shooter and victim were both 12 or younger. That’s one of the highest counts in the country in that timeframe. 47 of those shootings were deadly.
“These cases really kind of tug at you and stay with you because of the loss of life and someone so young dying,” Clark County Prosecuting Attorney Daniel Driscoll told the I-Team. “And in these cases, it’s usually at the hands of either themselves or another child. And so those cases become very difficult to deal with.”
Driscoll’s office has reviewed several accidental shootings involving children.
Ohio does not have so-called safe storage laws – which are laws requiring gun owners to store their guns safely. But Driscoll says that has never stopped his office when they see something criminal in these types of cases.
“If it’s appropriate, we have no problems charging somebody,” Driscoll said.
The I-Team dug into what can be done to prevent these tragedies.
In Warren County, Officer Aaron Morgan with the Springboro Police Department says the city is one of 17 participating in Ohio’s Store It Safe program.
“We had to fill out an application and prove that we were committed to making a difference in that manner,” Officer Morgan told the I-Team.
“We have links on our website to the Store It Safe community. Store It Safe provided us with lock boxes that we can pass out to the community for free.”
Springboro joined just a few years after six-year-old Georvonie Campbell accidentally shot and killed himself inside a home on Royal Drive in Springboro in 2020.
“Georvonie unfortunately got ahold of the firearm when no one was around to see him, and kids are curious,” Officer Morgan said. “And unfortunately, it had a tragic outcome because it was left on a shelf.”
The Store It Safe program was established here in Ohio in 2015 by the Ohio chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). As a part of the program, doctors have conversations about gun safety with parents during patient visits.
“Pediatricians have a rich history of talking to patients and families about injury prevention,” said Dr. Vivek Ashok, a pediatrician practicing in southwest Ohio and a member of the Ohio AAP. “It starts with car seat safety for newborns. It goes on to seatbelt safety, wearing helmets for bikes. Firearm safety is actually something that’s been talked about for decades in the pediatric offices and is becoming more pervasive.”
Dr. Ashok calls the Store It Safe program a “critical” and “life-saving initiative.”
“Firearm-related injuries are the leading cause of death for children ages one to 19 and have been since 2020,” Dr. Ashok said. “And it’s important to know that these are preventable.”
The Ohio AAP hopes more communities across Ohio join the Store It Safe program.
“We don’t want to put too many requirements on the program because we know that communities are different and have different capabilities and different ways of getting messaging out there,” Marc Driscoll, an Education Program Manager with the Ohio AAP, said.
“There is an application process, but then we kind of tell the communities to do what works best for their community. And we’ve seen lots of different things. We’ve seen people do billboard campaigns. We’ve seen public service announcements. A lot of people do raffles of the lock boxes that we give out. It’s really kind of cool to see how each community approaches the program differently.”
“It’s so important,” Officer Morgan said of the Store It Safe program. “If you can make a difference for one family that doesn’t have to deal with a tragedy.”
Advocates of the Store It Safe program in Ohio say that among the goals of getting more Ohio communities to join the program is preventing any other families from experiencing the pain that James Fairley did.
He hopes sharing his daughter Nay’loni’s story will help save others.
“I just keep her memory alive,” Fairley told the I-Team.
Nay’loni’s mother was charged for leaving the gun in that case unattended. But the I-Team found many cases where law enforcement describes these as tragic accidents without charging the adults who were supposed to be responsible for those guns.
Additional research provided by University of Florida journalism students Drew Bank, Ciara Carle, Carlos Corzo, Krystal Felix, Victoria Perez, Genesis Trujillo, Grace Tucceri, Alexis Vivanco and Jessica Wilkinson.
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