A 12-year-old girl from Missouri reportedly shot her cousin to death and then killed herself by playing with a gun while filming on Instagram Live.
Paris Harvey and her cousin Kuaron Harvey, 14, were in a downtown St Louis apartment that the family rented to celebrate birthdays.
The boys were recording video playing with a gun in front of a mirror inside the bathroom when the gun accidentally went off, according to the family, who said it was a “freak accident.”
Police are investigating the deaths, which were initially described as a murder-suicide. The St Louis Metropolitan Police Department posted a tribute Saturday and offered condolences to his family.
“It wasn’t an argument situation or anything like that,” Susan Dyson, the girls’ grandmother, told the St Louis Post-Dispatch. “They played with the gun, when they shouldn’t have. Of course, they shouldn’t have. I think it just went off. It was shot by mistake.”
Video showed the bullet hit Kuaron and Paris grabbed the gun when it fired again, hitting her. Both boys were reportedly shot in the head.
According to the family, the gun belonged to Kuaron.
“It was not a murder. It was not a suicide. It was a freak accident. It happened,” said Paris’s mother, Shinise Harvey, 35.
Harvey said he hadn’t seen the video, but others explained it to him. Cousins were “trying to be too modern,” she said.
The bereaved family described Paris, a seventh grader and one of nine children, as someone with a beautiful voice who loved to do her hair and nails. Kuaron was a “prankster” eighth-grade student, they detailed.
The duo would often record videos together and play pranks on each other. “No matter how well we try to raise our children, they will still be at risk,” Harvey added.
