JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office was investigating an accidental shooting involving a child after a man was found with a gunshot wound outside a day care center on Wednesday.
News4JAX spoke with Alegra Gardner, the day care owner, who said the incident involved a young child who “got a hold of a gun and it grazed a father’s head.”
Gardner added that the child was not enrolled at her facility.
A heavily redacted report provided by JSO indicates that around noon, police were dispatched to the parking lot of a day care center on Dunn Avenue in reference to a person who had been shot.
When the officer arrived, he said he saw a man leaning into the front passenger seat of his SUV. The officer then saw the man with a towel pressed to his forehead as he got out of his car, the report says.
“He was alert, conscious and breathing,” the responding officer stated in the report.
According to the report, the officer also observed that the man had an “approximately two-inch-long gash horizontally across his forehead.”
Jacksonville Fire and Rescue transported the man to a nearby hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, and he was later released.
The JSO incident report does not provide any details about the shooting, including how it happened. However, the report does indicate someone was charged with culpable negligence and that a minor was involved in the incident.
Gardner said when the shooting happened, she first checked to make sure her students weren’t injured.
After that, her staff called 911, and then she went outside to check on what had happened.
“It was kind of scary,” Gardner said.
This shooting came nearly two months after a 2-year-old boy died after he accidentally shot himself.
“This same thing is on repeat where either little ones are shooting other little ones or adults get shot because kids are curious,” News4JAX Crime and Safety Analyst Tom Hackney said. “Keeping control of those guns is critical in cars and in homes, the same thing really applies. There’s some many commercially available products out there.”
The report also states that the gun that was discharged was a 9mm semiautomatic handgun.
Rod Mills, a gun safety expert, said there are some products people need to have to avoid incidents like these.
“With the soft case, actually, what you can do is line up the zipper and eyelet and put a TSA-type lock on this and that will keep a kid out of it. And then also you have a car safe here. This is a safe that has a combination on it, however, some have keys. You can put a firearm in here,” Mills said.
News4JAX reached out to JSO to ask if there was an arrest report available and responded, “There is no arrest report; this continues to be an ongoing investigation.”
