INDIANAPOLIS — Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department homicide detectives and the Marion County Coroner determined that an 11-year-old boy accidentally shot himself to death inside a home in the 3700 block of East Market Street Sunday.
Detectives have not revealed how Jordan Robertson came into possession of the gun.
IMPD reports that 12 juveniles have been the victims of gun homicides, intentional and accidental, this year.
In 2023 so far, 42 children have survived gunshot wounds, compared with 52 for all of last year.
IMPD does not track the number of children who have died as the result of accidental self-inflicted shootings.
”We as responsible gun owners, and I say that we have to start at home, we have to make sure that we are putting our guns up and are not treating our guns like cell phones,” said Pastor Eddie Smith Sr. of Tuxedo Park Baptist Church. “I go into different houses in our community and guns are lying around, all callous like literally a book or a cell phone, so that needs to stop.”
Smith and other clergy members made an unsuccessful trip Monday morning to the two-story on East Market Street to pray with the family and offer services in the wake of the fatal shooting which occurred in the presence of several other children.
”This is probably unfortunately since May the fourth or fifth time that we’ve been out having to talk to families who have been struck by tragedy,” Smith said. “We were just over on Sunday at the site at 21st & Emerson where there was a tragedy where the seventeen-year-old shot a 24-year-old who was his family member.”
Smith’s church is in the same general community as that where a 5-year-old fatally injured himself with an unattended handgun. An adult faces a neglect charge in that case.
”Our youth, they are literally being snuffed out by gun violence and I think it is incumbent upon us as a community to hold each other accountable,” said the pastor whose own son was wounded by gunfire last winter.
”In January my son and one of his friends who he was mentoring was shot at Castleton, so they were part of the Castleton shooting, and to find out the backstory behind it, it is literally guns are plentiful, people are afraid and the first thing people want to do is shoot and they don’t take into account the consequences and the life changes behind it.”
Last month Marion County Public Health Director Dr. Virginia Caine told Fox 59 News that she could support the declaration of a public health emergency over the issue of juvenile gunshot wounds.
”Maybe it means we start a public health crisis or emergency so that we can put resources together and we could all work together to stem this violence but something has to happen,” said Smith, a gun owner. ”I also think that training is an issue. I believe in the 2nd Amendment but lets require training so that people can actually understand the gravity of being a firearms owner.”
Recently the Marion County Prosecutor charged the mother of a six-year-old with neglect after her son retrieved a gun from her purse and accidentally shot himself to death in the Amber Woods Apartments last spring.
