Six-Year-Old Boy Shoots Dead Younger Brother While Playing Cops-and-Robbers

A game of cops-and-robbers turned into a horrific crime scene in Chicago on Saturday night, when a six-year-old boy shot and killed his three-year-old brother with his father’s revolver, police said.

Michael Santiago, a 25-year-old former gang member and the father of the two boys, had purchased the revolver for protection and placed on top of his fridge, the Daily News reports.

Santiago was working late at Pap Ray’s Pizza, where he is a manager, and his wife, Angela Lasalle, and her father had left the boys alone for a few minutes on Saturday night.

The boys, Eian, 3, and his older brother were playing their game when the eldest accidentally fired the gun, police said. Lasalle called Santiago.

“He was in shock,” George Rayyan, a family friend, told the News. “He couldn’t understand his wife, she was crying so much.”

Santiago has been charged with felony child endangerment for allegedly showing his eldest son where he kept the unprotected pistol.

This weekend marks just one in a long line of child shootings. This summer, another toddler was fatally shot by her 7-year-old brother, and this month an 11-year-old-boy in Tennessee was charged with first-degree murder after shooting his 8-year-old neighbor, the Washington Post reports.

[Daily News]