An Indiana man was arrested Saturday after his toddler was caught on apartment building surveillance footage playing with a loaded gun.
In the video below, the young boy can be seen unsupervised, wandering the halls in a diaper while waving and pointing the firearm in an apartment complex in Beech Grove, Indiana.
The father, identified as 45-year-old Shane Osborne, faces a felony charge for neglect of a dependent, according to CNN.
Police responded to the apartment after neighbors reported seeing the boy holding a gun, walking inside the building’s common hallway. Osborne denied he had a gun in the residence, according to police.
He told them he was ill and had been sleeping, and he said he did not know his son had been outside his apartment unit.
As the officers were exiting the building, neighbors insisted to them that they were certain of what they’d seen. “That baby had a gun … He pointed at me and said, ‘Look what I got, ha ha,'” a woman living in the building told officers in the video.
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Another neighbor stopped the officers just before they left, telling them she had captured surveillance footage of the incident. After she showed it to them on her phone, the officers returned to the apartment, where they searched for and found the weapon.
Osborne allegedly told police the gun belonged to his cousin, who’d left it there, but responding officers were skeptical.
He’d previously been convicted of felony theft and forgery, he told police, which would make it illegal for him to possess a gun under federal law.
The boy was returned to his mother, whom he lives with, and then Osborne was taken into custody. He is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday afternoon. It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney.
Beech Grove mayor Dennis B. Buckley told Fox 59 that he was “mortified [about] what took place” and is “so thankful that no one was hurt, especially the young child.”
“I appreciate the quick action taken by the Beech Grove Police Department to secure the small child and the gun in question,” Buckley said. “I ask that the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office work tirelessly to secure charges and a conviction against the responsible parties, with maximum penalties. Society shouldn’t accept anything less.”
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In November, a North Carolina father was charged in connection with the death of his toddler son, who accidentally killed himself while playing with his dad’s loaded gun, authorities said.
Two-year-old Warren Bennett Oser had climbed through an open door into his father’s truck, where a loaded Smith & Wesson 40-caliber handgun was on the front seat, according to the Johnston County Sheriff’s Office.
While playing with the gun, the child was able to fire one round into his head, authorities said. The little boy was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
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