Utah boy, 8, dies after accidentally shooting himself in car outside of gas station

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

An 8-year-old boy has died after accidentally shooting himself in the head while his mother was inside a Utah convenience store, police said.

The boy, who has not been named, was alone in the car outside Maverik, a gas station and convenience store in Lehi, when the incident happened around 7:40 p.m. Monday.

Doug Shields told KSL that he was putting gas in his vehicle when he heard the gunshot and a woman screaming, The Associated Press reported. Shields rushed over to the car where the shooting happened and heard the mother say the boy found the gun under the seat, he told KSL and KUTV.

“And then she goes, ‘He shot himself, he shot himself, he shot himself,’” Shields said about the boy’s mother. “And I first thought suicide, and she goes, ‘He found the gun under my seat and pulled the trigger.’ It apparently was an accident. It was a total accident.”

First responders arrived on the scene just before 8 p.m. and performed life-saving procedures on the child. He was rushed to the hospital, where he died on Tuesday from his injuries.

The shooting appeared to be “unintentional and self-inflicted,” police said in a statement.

Monday’s shooting happened less than two weeks after a 5-year-old Utah boy died after accidentally shooting himself with a handgun at his house in Santaquin, which is about 65 miles south of Salt Lake City.

Utah does not have any laws to penalize someone for failing to secure an unattended firearm and leaving it accessible to an unsupervised minor, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The state also does not require unattended firearms to be stored in a certain way or require a locking device to be sold with a firearm.

In St. Louis, a 4-year-old girl died Monday from a gunshot wound suffered while he was in a house with three other children under the age of 10 and no adults present. Police are trying to determine who was handling the gun at the time of the shooting.