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<div class=""><form class="" action="/search" method="get"><input class="" id="search" name="q" value="" type="text"></form></div><br><h1 class="">Week after week, Georgia child gun deaths mount</h1><p>Posted: 12:00 a.m. Saturday, May 11, 2013</p>
By <a href="http://www.ajc.com/staff/alan-judd/">Alan Judd</a>
-
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
<div class=""><p>Charles Stanovich adored his
little sister. When she was born, he picked her name: Jenn Alexandra.
When she wore lip gloss to first grade, he was quick to register
brotherly disapproval.</p><p>“They were so good together,” said their mother, Haydee Stanovich. “He took care of her.”</p><p>Last
July 23, Charles and Jenn were three weeks into a month-long visit with
their grandmother in Monroe County, 75 miles south of Atlanta. Charles
had spent the day stalking armadillos with one of his grandmother’s
guns. At home in Connecticut, firearms were forbidden. In rural Georgia,
Charles could hunt and shoot, just as his father did when he was a boy.</p><p>Still,
Charles, 13, wasn’t supposed to have the rifle in his bedroom, so it
must have startled him when Jenn appeared in his doorway. Somehow, the
gun fired. Jenn, wounded in the chest and hand, was pronounced dead less
than an hour later at a Macon hospital.</p><p>She was 6 years old.</p><p>As
Americans debate the proper balance between gun control and gun rights,
most discussions of children and firearms center on the extremes: mass
shootings like the one in a Connecticut elementary school, or the gang
violence that pervades places like inner-city Chicago. But an analysis
by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows that, in Georgia, most young
victims of firearms die as Jenn did: one at a time, with little public
outcry, and under circumstances that could have been prevented.</p><p>Georgia
has some of the nation’s least restrictive gun laws, particularly to
keep firearms away from children, the Journal-Constitution found. At the
same time, it has a higher rate of firearms-related deaths among
children age 17 or younger than all but 12 other states.</p><p>The
correlation between gun laws and firearms deaths is a complex issue,
often shaded as much by ideology as by fact. If a child can’t get a gun,
he or she obviously won’t shoot anyone. But merely having access to a
weapon doesn’t mean a child will use it. Regardless, the sheer number of
deaths makes a compelling statement about the prominent role guns play
in the state’s culture.</p><p>From 1999 to 2010, 602 children died from
gunshot wounds in Georgia, according to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention: 50 every year, one every seven days.</p><p>Homicides accounted for more than twice as many deaths as suicides. The rest resulted from accidental shootings.</p><p>These
patterns continue into 2013. The Journal-Constitution examined more
than five dozen fatal shootings of Georgia children and teenagers since
2010, an incomplete list culled from news stories, police reports and
other public records. Among the victims were toddlers who shot
themselves while playing with their parents’ guns and gang members
killed over drug deals. Seven children died in murder-suicides. Three
were shot to death by the police.</p><p>Twenty-eight were killed by
other children or teens, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose. In
16 of those instances, the fatal shots came from guns left in homes or
cars, loaded and unsecured.</p><p>Gun-rights advocates suggest that
firearms training would do more than new laws to protect children. Some
favor mandating gun safety courses in public schools.</p><p>“If you want
kids to be safe, you need to teach them how to be safe” through
hands-on experience with a firearm, said Jerry Henry, executive director
of Georgia Carry, a gun-rights lobbying group. “They see what it does.
They feel the kick and hear the bang. And all of a sudden, it’s not a
game any more. They understand what this is for.”</p><p>Numerous
studies, however, have shown an association between weak gun laws and
more deaths, among both adults and children. In March, for example,
researchers from Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital
reported in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine that the lowest death
rates are in states that restrict firearms trafficking, require
extensive background checks of gun buyers, limit ownership of
military-style assault weapons and prohibit firearms in most public
places.</p><p>On the other hand, few states have tougher gun laws than
Connecticut, where Jenn Stanovich lived in a small town near Hartford.
It is 70 miles from Newtown, where all the state’s laws could do nothing
to prevent the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.</p><p><strong>‘SOUTHERN KID’</strong></p><p>Jenn Stanovich, her mother said, was a “girly girl.”</p><p>She loved purple and pink. She loved boots and horses. And she loved her brother.</p>
<p>Family
photographs show Jenn and Charles posing together at Yankee Stadium;
showing off their best clothes in a restaurant on Mother’s Day last
year; rolling on the floor at home. In one picture, Jenn wears a pink
tiara and a pink leotard with a ruffled pink skirt. It’s her 4th
birthday. One hand holds a gift, a new doll. The other wraps around
Charles’ neck, drawing his face close to hers.</p><p>Last July, for the
third summer in a row, Charles and Jenn came to Georgia for an extended
visit with their grandmother, Lynda. Their father, Richard, stayed with
them while their mother, a mental health counselor, remained at work in
Connecticut.</p><p>During earlier visits to Georgia, Charles had learned
how to handle guns, Haydee Stanovich said. A native of Nicaragua, she
was not accustomed to seeing guns used for sport. They made her
uncomfortable. But Charles wanted to hunt and shoot, to have the same
experiences his father did growing up in Georgia — to be, she said, “a
regular Southern kid.”</p><p>“I never agreed with it,” she said. “But they’re boys.”</p><p>Charles’
parents differed over allowing him to shoot. But his father was adamant
that if he used guns, he would do so safely. “He was not to take the
rifle out without me knowing about it,” Richard Stanovich said.</p><p>On
July 23, a Monday, Charles had used a Mossberg International 702
Plinkster, a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle, to fire at the armadillos
that had invaded his grandmother’s garden. Late that night, as his
father and grandmother sat in the kitchen, Charles slipped the weapon
into his room.</p><p>He would later say he thought he had unloaded the
gun before laying it on his bed. Soon, Charles told sheriff’s deputies,
Jenn came to the door of his room, and somehow the rifle ended up on the
floor.</p><p>In the kitchen, Richard heard what sounded to him like a deafening clap.</p><p>“At first, it didn’t register,” he said recently. Then, from the back of the house, Charles screamed, “I have shot my sister!”</p>
<p>Bleeding
from her hand, Jenn stumbled to her father. He scooped her up and held
her in his lap at the kitchen table, tending to the injured hand. That’s
when he noticed the other wound — a small, bloodless hole about four
inches above her navel. The house filled with people trying to help: a
volunteer firefighter and a paramedic who live nearby and sheriff’s
deputies and, finally, an ambulance crew. Richard sensed almost
immediately that they could not save his daughter.</p><p>“She was slipping away,” he said later. “She was gone.”</p><p>Jenn
arrived at a hospital in Macon, 30 miles away, about 1 a.m. Her father
waited outside the emergency room, alone, until doctors emerged, visibly
upset. The bullet had nicked Jenn’s aorta, they told Richard. Nothing
could have stopped her internal bleeding.</p><p>Richard asked to see the
body. “I thought, ‘I have to tell my baby goodbye,’ ” he said later.
“That’s the last thing — the last thing — I ever expected.”</p><p>Almost
three weeks later, the sheriff’s department closed its investigation.
No charges would be filed, either against Charles for the shooting or
against the adults in the house for not securing the gun.</p><p>“It is
quite apparent that this was a very unfortunate accident,” a sheriff’s
investigator concluded, “and Charles, the victim’s brother, will most
likely need extensive counseling.”</p><p><strong>CHARGES ARE RARE</strong></p><p>Five
days after Jenn Stanovich died, 2-year-old Jeremiah McCrae was playing
at home in Douglas, Ga., when he made a dangerous discovery: a shiny
black handgun, stashed beneath a pillow in an upstairs bedroom.</p><p>It
was late on a Sunday afternoon. Jeremiah’s mother, Alexis McCrae, was
downstairs cooking dinner, a police report would later say. Jeremiah’s
6-year-old brother, Jabez, was playing in another room when he saw the
toddler at the top of the stairs, holding the gun. Jabez reached to take
it away. Jeremiah resisted.</p><p>When the first police officer arrived, several children were outside crying.</p><p>“Someone shot my brother,” one said.</p><p>Upstairs,
the officer’s report said, Alexis McCrae was holding the youngest of
her four children by the shoulders as blood pooled in the carpet beneath
his head. Jeremiah was pronounced dead at the local hospital. Recent
efforts to reach Alexis McCrae were unsuccessful.</p><p>At the house, on
the upstairs floor, an officer found the weapon: a 9 mm Hi-Point C9
semi-automatic pistol. On a night stand in the bedroom where Jeremiah
was playing, the officer saw a box of 50 bullets. Police determined the
weapon belonged to a 24-year-old who lived in Jeremiah’s house but who
was away at the time of the shooting.</p><p>Afterward, detectives
considered filing charges against the gun’s owner, said Sgt. Robert
Sprinkle, head of the Douglas Police Department’s criminal investigation
unit. But after talking to social services workers, victims’ advocates
and others, they decided to close the case “in the best interests of the
family,” Sprinkle said.</p><p>In Georgia, it is illegal to “knowingly”
or “recklessly” give a gun to a minor “for illegal purposes.” The law
covers handguns, but not rifles or shotguns, and applies to parents only
if they knew their child was likely to use a weapon to commit a crime.
In addition, adults may be charged with reckless conduct if they allow
minors to obtain guns they use to harm themselves or another person.
But, according to Georgia Department of Corrections records, not a
single person has served prison time for such an offense in at least 10
years.</p><p>Six states impose criminal penalties for an adult’s
allowing a child to obtain a gun under any circumstance, according to
the National Conference of State Legislatures. Eight more states hold
adults accountable if a child uses a gun in any way. Those 14 states
also make it a crime to store loaded or unloaded firearms in a negligent
manner. Massachusetts and the District of Columbia go a step further,
requiring gun owners to store their weapons under lock and key.</p><p>Among the states with the toughest laws, only Illinois has a higher rate of death from firearms than Georgia.</p><p>In
Georgia, law enforcement authorities have a great deal of discretion in
prosecuting owners of guns that kill children. Unless they pulled the
trigger themselves, the adults rarely face charges. In the deaths
examined by the Journal-Constitution, authorities charged just four
adults for providing the guns that killed three children.</p><p>For
example, Clayton County police charged Robert Allen Bethune in 2011
after he gave his 15-year-old neighbor a .38-caliber revolver with which
the boy killed a former girlfriend. The boy, Kevin Kosturi, had told
Bethune he needed to protect himself from someone who threatened him at
church.</p><p>A judge sentenced Kosturi to life in prison for killing
Angel Freeman, 16. Bethune, who told authorities that giving Kosturi the
gun was “stupid,” was sentenced to three years.</p><p><strong>‘SO CLOSE TO HOME’</strong></p><p>The
morning of Dec. 14, Haydee Stanovich went to the mental health clinic
where she works near her family’s home in Coventry, Conn. It had been 4 ½
months since Jenn died, but Stanovich remained in a haze. Jenn’s death
seemed so far in the past, and yet remained so fresh in her memory.</p><p>“She was my life,” Stanovich would say later. “She was my only daughter. She was my everything.”</p><p>Stanovich
paid little attention to a news bulletin on her computer that morning:
shots fired at a school barely an hour away. Busy with clients, she
didn’t learn more until lunchtime: a gunman had burst into Sandy Hook
Elementary in Newtown and killed 20 children and six adults before
taking his own life.</p><p>“It was all so close to home,” Stanovich said recently. “They were all the same age as my daughter.”</p><p>For
days afterward, she said, all she could do was watch the televised news
coverage of the families in mourning, families so much like her own.
Her husband and her sister could not stop weeping as they saw images of
children so much like Jenn.</p><p>“Everybody,” Stanovich said, “was crying and sad.”</p><p>The
deaths in Newtown made clear to Haydee Stanovich that she and her
family will never get over what happened to Jenn. Her husband, she said,
is depressed and suffers from post-traumatic stress. The family is in
counseling together, and Charles sees another therapist on his own. He
is angry, his mother said. “He feels like people are judging him all the
time.”</p><p>Richard Stanovich isn’t quite sure how to regard his son.
He described the shooting as “a tragic mistake,” but said he cannot
imagine why Charles acted so carelessly.</p><p>“If I hold it against my son, then I’ve lost both children,” Stanovich said. “I can’t do that.”</p><p>But
he also said: “I laid down the law with him. I went over every rule. …
There was no neglect. There was no parental irresponsibility — none of
that. It was just a child who was trying to be more than he was. He
related so much to the Southern way of life.”</p><p>As the public debate
over guns and children drags on, Haydee and Richard Stanovich find
themselves conflicted. She said she appreciates the liberties guaranteed
in the United States, including the right to own guns. In Jenn’s case,
she doesn’t think criminal charges would have served any purpose; as it
is, she said, the family is “devastated.”</p><p>“But I don’t think a person should have a gun lying around,” Haydee said. “It should be locked away with a freaking key.”</p><p>Richard
is a lifelong gun owner who could never support a ban on firearms. His
father, who was in the military, taught him to take apart and reassemble
guns, and he grew up loving to hunt and shoot. He still has one gun at
home, now protected with two locks. But since Jenn’s death, he said, he
doesn’t care to fire it again.</p><p>“I’m not against firearms,” he said. “I personally don’t feel like dealing with the results of what I saw.”</p><p>Charles, though, betrays no reservations, his parents said.</p><p>He still wants to visit his grandmother in Georgia. He still wants to shoot her guns.</p>
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