Orange County, Texas, Sheriff's Office. Melissa Ann Ringhardt, 19, of Vidor, Texas, was charged with abandoning or endangering a child after 5-year-old John Read shot and killed himself with her gun Monday, authorities said.
A teenage babysitter was arrested Tuesday and charged in the death of a 5-year-old Texas boy who accidentally shot himself with the babysitter's gun while she was napping, authorities said.
Melissa Ann Ringhardt, 19, of Vidor was being held in the Orange County Jail on a felony charge of abandoning or endangering a child, the county sheriff's office said in a statement. She could face a sentence of six months to two years if convicted
The sheriff's office said Ringhardt, who lives with the boy's family, left her semiautomatic .40-caliber handgun on a coffee table when she went into a bedroom to take a nap Monday afternoon. When she woke up, she couldn't immediately find the boy, identified as John Read, according to the sheriff's office. She eventually discovered him dead in the living room, it said.
Because the home has no telephone, Ringhardt carried John and a 6-month-old child, whom she was also watching and who wasn't identified, about a block to his grandparents' home to call 911, the sheriff's office said. John was declared dead there when emergency crews arrived.
Ringhardt told investigators she had the gun because she was frightened of being home alone, the sheriff's office said.
No phone and no cell phone either? How is that?
This girl is another victim of the gun rights movement. She believed the lie that having a gun is a good way to provide for your safety. Too often, it's not.
She's the victim of being an idiot, and there's no defense against that.
ReplyDeleteYeah, she learned it from guys like you, Greg.
DeleteThere you go again, tossing out insults that you know to be false.
DeleteDo you think she learned that carrying a gun for her protection was a good idea from some gun control person? No, she learned it from someone like you. That's why you share in the responsibility for shit like this which happens every day.
DeleteThat pink-haired (think- pinko, she has likely been brainwashed into a communist/Satanist cult) juvenile delinquent IS a prohibited person, forbidden under our unpatrioticly lax existing laws from owning that firearm.
ReplyDeleteThe straw purchaser who provided her with the gun should be executed by military firing squad.
MikeB: “Failing to state that I disagree with the degree of "ban" is one thing, but failing to call someone out for saying that 50 women a month deserve death is quite another.”
DeleteOpps, looks like you support BANtheNRA’s hateful calls for the deaths of straw purchasers because you just condoned it with your silence.
What straw purchase? A nineteen-year old can own a gun in Texas. BANtheNRA is just a troll, not a real person.
DeleteNow investigate, expose, hold accountable, if not directly legislate against and regulate the NRA... These are some things within the realm of possibility in the U.S.
Might be simpler just to boycott the NRA. Form a new association of responsible gun owners. Shitcan the NRA! Yay!
"People have the right to bear arms, and with that comes great responsibility," Orange County sheriff's Chief Deputy Clint Hodgkinson told KFDM-TV of Beaumont. "If someone, somehow, puts a firearm in a place where a child is able to get that weapon, you've committed an offense."
ReplyDeleteThe Sheriff is quite correct.