2 Cousins Dead After Gun Incident Live-Streamed On Instagram

I hate stories like this. Stories where youthful behavior ends in senseless tragedy. Stories where kids play with guns and someone or someones die as a result.

There’s nothing particularly uncommon about tragic stories involving kids, guns, and untimely death, but now we have social media and it’s happening on camera. And in this case, two deaths happened with one being an accidental suicide.

Source: Erlon Silva – TRI Digital / Getty

According to NBC News, two young children, cousins, in St. Louis, Missouri, were live-streaming on Instagram when one child who had a gun fatally shot the other and then killed herself afterward.

12-year-old Paris Harvey and her cousin, 14-year-old Kuaron Harvey, were both pronounced dead at the scene that occurred around 2 a.m. Friday. St. Louis police, of course, classified the incident as a murder-suicide—likely because when it comes to Black youth and guns, accidental shootings are virtually nonexistent in the eyes of the law—but Paris’ mother, Shinise Harvey, told KSDK something different. 

Harvey said she let her daughter go to the apartment where the shooting happened for a birthday celebration. She said her daughter and Kuaron, her brother’s son, were making a video during which Paris was playing with the gun, “but it went off and hit” Kuaron.

Harvey said Paris “dropped the gun, and it fell, and it went off, to my knowledge.” She also denied her daughter intentionally killed herself saying when Paris picked up the fallen gun, “she picked it up by the barrel and it went off.”

“That’s all I know,” Harvey continued. “It was not a suicide. It was just a freak accident.”

Harvey also said she had no idea how her daughter got ahold of a gun in the first place.

“We’ve got to look out for each other. We’re a family, and they’re young,” Harvey said.

There’s no word of how Paris got a gun or whether any charges will be filed in the wake of this sad tragedy, but the police said they’re still investigating the incident.

All we know for certain now is that two children are dead and a family, including two immediate families, is forever broken because of it.

We pray for peace and healing for everyone involved.