Father Charged After 3-Year-Old Boy Shot in the Face in Chicago

Ronald Davis was arrested in connection with the apparent accidental fatal shooting of his 3-year-old son in Chicago, Illinois on July 28, 2019. (Chicago Police Department)

The father of a 3-year-old boy who was killed in an apparent accidental shooting in Chicago has been charged in connection with the child’s death.

Ronald Davis, 29, was charged with child endangerment and one count of unlawful use of a weapon by a felon, police said, according to CBS.

ABC7 reported that investigators believe Davis knowingly left a loaded gun in a place where it could be accessed by a child..

The little boy, identified as Mikah Davis, was shot in the face on Sunday, July 28, and died shortly after the shooting. Police found him around 4:15 p.m. local time at a home at the 9600 block of South Escanaba in South Deering, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. He was suffering from a gunshot wound to the face.

Authorities cited in the report said the child was rushed to Advocate Trinity Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.

Police spokesperson Anthony Gugliemi initially indicated in a Twitter post that the shooting may have been an accident.

He recounted that the boy’s family had told police they heard a gunshot while in another room, only to then find the boy with a gun.

Gugliemi wrote that the Department of Children and Family Services had “also been called in to assist.”

A neighbor told the Chicago Tribune that she had seen a man and a woman run out of the home, and they were carrying what she deemed to be an unconscious child to a car before driving off.

“The parents walk out, run out, with their child and something was wrapped on his head. They just rushed to the car and left,” said neighbor Lizbeth Nunez, according to Fox 32 Chicago.

Another neighbor was cited by Fox 32 as calling the incident “devastating,” adding that “this is something you don’t want to see anywhere.”

Fox News noted that the boy was one of nine people who had been shot dead over the weekend. The outlet reported that Lori Lightfoot, the city’s new mayor, has been meeting with police weekly to review weekend shooting statistics in the city and propose solutions for the situation.

Lightfoot said earlier in July that “it feels like we are losing the streets.”

One-Year-Old Boy Shot in the Head

Earlier this year, a one-year-old boy met a similar situation. The boy was shot in the head on Feb. 7 while he was sitting in the back passenger side of a parked car outside a relative’s home, police officials said.

Miraculously, he survived the shooting. The boy was later identified as Dejon Irving.

CBS reported that Irving was sitting in the car with his grandmother, mother, 5-year-old brother, and 4-year-old cousin when a dark-colored sedan pulled up. A person inside the sedan then shot nine times into the car but only one of the bullets caused any injury, hitting the boy’s head.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the grandmother told police she had heard her car windows shatter and saw her grandson shot in the head as she turned around.

The boy was rushed to the hospital. He was in critical condition and had to be on life support for three weeks before his miraculous recovery, CBS reported.

Facts About Crime in the United States

Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).

The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.

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The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.

The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend.

Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.

Epoch Times reporter Mimi Nguyen-Ly and NTD reporter Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.