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Crime, Law and Justice
Dan Kraker
Duluth

3-year old boy in Hinckley fatally shoots himself with gun found in father's house

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The Pine County Sheriff’s Office said it’s investigating how a three-year-old boy shot and killed himself Tuesday night after finding a handgun in his father's house.

Pine County Sheriff's deputies responded to a home on the 500 block of 1st St. Southwest in Hinckley, Minn., at about 9:15 p.m. on Tuesday.

According to an application for a search warrant filed by law enforcement, a man called Pine County dispatch “screaming for help,” saying “his son had shot himself.”

The father and his roommate say they were in the basement when they heard something fall upstairs. Soon after, they heard a gunshot.

They ran upstairs and found the boy lying in the roommate’s room with a gunshot wound to his head. The man “stated he had a 9mm handgun in his room and that was what [the child] got ahold of.”

When investigators arrived, they found the child lying in an upstairs bedroom on a mattress.

“Lying near the child was a black cell phone and a gun in question was lying on top of the safe about five feet from the child but the gun had been moved in the process of trying to save the child,” according to the court document.

Officers attempted lifesaving measures, but the child was pronounced dead ten minutes after they arrived.

The Pine County Sheriff's Office and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension are investigating. No charges have yet been filed.

The court documents list the boy’s age as four years old, but a spokesperson with the Sheriff’s Office said deputies found the child was actually three.