Moments after two children were playing with toy guns, one of the children picked up a real rifle in a western Alaska home and fatally shot the other child, authorities said.
Alaska State Troopers were notified by both tribal and local police Sunday of the child’s death in Mountain Village, the statewide law enforcement agency said.
Troopers responded and found “two children were playing with Nerf guns when one of them picked up a rifle and shot the other one,” the troopers said in an online statement.
Village health aides declared the child dead, and the body will be sent to Anchorage for an autopsy.
The child got the rifle inside the home where the shooting occurred, and an adult was inside the home at the time, troopers spokesperson Austin McDaniel told the Anchorage Daily News.
No criminal charges have been filed, and McDaniel said the investigation is ongoing. The Anchorage newspaper reported it’s rare for a gun owner in Alaska to be prosecuted when someone is killed or injured when a child obtains the weapon.
Few details about the children involved, including names and ages, will be released “due to the size of the community that this tragic event occurred and our requirement to protect juvenile information,” McDaniel said.
Mountain Village, a Yup’ik community of 600 people who practice a traditional subsistence lifestyle, is located about 470 miles (756 kilometers) northwest of Anchorage.
In the Red Sea this morning, a U.S. warship, the USS Carney responded to a distress call by a commercial vessel after it came under attack.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection in southern California announced it confiscated thousands of pounds of illegal drugs hidden in a jalapeno paste shipment.
Former family YouTuber Ruby Franke is set to enter a plea agreement on child abuse charges in a Utah courtroom, according to her lawyers. Frank and her business partner, Jody Hildebrand were arrested in August after two of Franke's children were found with injuries and evidence of malnutrition in Hildebrandt's home.
Backers are far from gathering enough signatures, but if the measure makes the June 2024 ballot and voters pass it, North Dakota would have to replace ballot scanners with hundreds of workers.
It's part of the push to remove symbols that commemorate the Confederacy from military facilities.
The company is asking customers to throw out certain types of granola bars and granola cereals to avoid infection.
It could be a cold, grim New Year for thousands of migrant families living in New York City’s emergency shelter system. With winter setting in, they are being told they need to clear out, with no guarantee they’ll be given a bed elsewhere.
Vermont is often ranked as one of the nation's safest states. But since October, it has had 10 homicides and one suspicious death, including a double homicide in Burlington.
Officials in Mexico are trying to determine what's responsible for the death of a man and injuries to a woman at a Pacific coast resort.
The Virginia mother whose six-year-old son brought a gun to school and shot his teacher is expected to be sentenced.
