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8-year-old Utah boy dies after shooting himself in car while mother was inside store
An 8-year-old boy has died after accidentally shooting himself with a loaded gun left in a car while his mother was inside a Utah convenience store, police said.
The boy was alone in the car about 7:40 p.m. Monday in Lehi — a city about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City — when he shot himself in the head, Jeanteil Livingston with the Lehi City Police Department confirmed to CBS News. The incident occurred in a vehicle located in the parking lot of a Maverick gas station, police said.
The boy was taken to a local hospital in extremely critical condition. He was later airlifted to a hospital up north and died Tuesday morning, police said.
The shooting appeared to be “unintentional and self-inflicted,” police said in a statement.
The gun was under a seat in the car, Livingston said. Investigators do not know if the safety was ever on, she said.
Doug Shields said he was putting gas in his vehicle when he heard the gunshot and then a woman screaming. He went to the car where it happened. He told KSL and KUTV that he heard the mother say the boy found the gun under the seat.
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.
No charges are currently pending against the mother of the Lehi boy, Livingston said. The shooting is still under investigation. In Michigan last week police charged the parents of a 9-year-old for violating the state’s safe storage law after their son shot himself in the hand.
In St. Louis, a 4-year-old girl died Monday from a gunshot wound suffered while she 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.
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Husband of Russia’s richest woman arrested for murder after deadly shootout at offices of retail giant Wildberries
The estranged husband of Russia’s richest woman and CEO of retail giant Wildberries was arrested Thursday and charged with several crimes including murder, a day after a deadly armed raid at the company’s central Moscow offices.
Billionaire Tatyana Bakalchuk released a tearful message a day earlier, saying her husband Vladislav Bakalchuk, whom she is currently divorcing, led an armed raid into the Wildberries offices.
Vladislav Bakalchuk’s lawyers said in a message on his social media page that he was “detained for 48 hours” and charged with murder, attempted murder, assault of a law enforcement officer and vigilantism.
Two people, including a security guard, were killed in the shooting at the offices, which lie a few streets away from the Kremlin.
The incident came weeks after the company finalized a merger deal that Vladislav criticized and that strongman Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov vowed to stop.
Vladislav’s lawyers said he was on his way to a “pre-agreed meeting to settle a corporate conflict.” Vladislav alleges that it was staff at the office who fired the first shots, the Reuters news agency reported.
But Bakalchuk called her husband’s claims “absurd” and said “no one agreed to any negotiations.”
“Vladislav, what are you doing? How are you going to look in the eyes of your parents and our children?”
Wildberries is Russia’s largest online retailer. Tatyana Bakalchuk founded the company in 2004, growing it from an online clothes reseller into a major marketplace for countless other products, Reuters reported.
According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index in 2021, she was the 40th richest woman in the world and the first self-made woman billionaire out of Russia.
Tatyana Bakalchuk is the majority oner of the company, while her estranged husband holds a one-percent stake.