Toddler playing with loaded gun shoots pregnant mother

Officials in the US have issued a plea for gun safety after a three-year-old girl shot her pregnant mother with an unattended firearm.

The incident occurred in a car park outside a second-hand clothing store in Merrillville, Indiana, on Tuesday afternoon.

The toddler and her one-year-old brother were in the car with a 21-year-old woman identified as their mother when the older child picked up a loaded handgun left in the vehicle. She was said to be playing with the weapon when it went off.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The bullet “hit the mother from the back in the upper right chest before going through the windshield”, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Employee Hadassah Zirkle said that she and he co-workers brought the girl and her brother inside to wait for police after a customer alerted her to the gruesome scene.

“I walked outside and there was just blood falling everywhere,” she told The Times of Northwestern Indiana.

The wounded woman, said to be in the early stages of pregnancy, was rushed to a local hospital before being transferred to a hospital in Chicago, where she remains in a critical but stable condition.

The girl’s father, the owner of the weapon, was not in the car when the shooting occurred. The man, who was taken into custody on suspicion of child endangerment, told police that he had left the weapon by the side of his seat.

“It’s frustrating,” Merrillville police chief Joseph Petruch said. “It was an unfortunate, careless incident that should’ve been prevented and it should’ve never happened.”

“Now this three-year-old, she’s going to have to live with this.”

The little girl “had no idea what she had done”, detective sergeant James Bogner told NBC Chicago.

“She was very scared. Just a beautiful little girl was put in a really bad situation today.”