A child fatally shot another Sunday when they got their hands on a loaded gun while playing in an Alaskan home.
The two kids were playing with toy Nerf guns around 1:45 a.m. in Mountain Village, an indigenous town located about 470 miles northwest of Anchorage, according to Alaska State Troopers.
One child picked up a loaded rifle and pulled the trigger, killing the other, the AST said.
The second child was dead by the time authorities arrived at the tragic scene.
The children found the gun inside the home where the shooting occurred, troopers spokesman Austin McDaniel told the Anchorage Daily News.
An adult was inside the home at the time of the shooting, but McDaniel would not say whether they were the owner of the loaded weapon.
No charges have been filed in the case, which is still under investigation.
Details about the children involved, including their ages, are not being released publicly “due to the size of the community that this tragic event occurred and our requirement to protect juvenile information,” McDaniel said.
The AST did not explicitly say whether the shooting was accidental.
Mountain Village is a Yup’ik community of 600 people who practice a traditional subsistence lifestyle.
Accidental gun deaths at the hands of teens and children are rare in Alaska.
If proven to be accidental, the Mountain Village shooting will be the first child shooting for the state this year, according to the Everytown database.
Alaska has not had a child-related shooting since 2019, but had several in the preceding years, the advocacy group’s research shows.
The accident is the latest in a string of children killing one another after finding unsecured weapons.
Last month, a 3-year-old child accidentally shot and killed their 1-year-old sister using a handgun found in their San Diego home.
The week prior, a 2-year-old child in Michigan died after shooting themselves with a firearm they found.
In May, a 9-year-old Texas boy killed his 4-year-old brother after he shot him in the head with his uncle’s loaded gun after the man taught the boys how to operate the weapon.
