Warning: Article has detailed accounts of the shooting
Breanna Gayle Devall Runions, 25, was charged with first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse in the death of Evangaline Gunter.
The child’s parents, Adam and Josie Gunter, told ABC affiliate WATE that Evangaline had been in temporary custody at a home in Rockwood, which Runions shared with girlfriend Christina Daniels and another child, a 7-year-old girl.
Before the shooting, Evangaline and the older girl were being punished that morning by Runions for not waking up the women and for eating Daniels’ food without permission, according to the warrant and a statement from Russell Johnson, district attorney general for Tennessee’s 9th Judicial District. Runions struck both girls with a sandal before forcing them to stand in different corners of the women’s bedroom, authorities said the older girl told them.
After the shooting, the women drove Evangaline to a nearby Walmart location to meet an ambulance, Roane County Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas Boduch told the Roane County News, and the vehicle transported the girl to a hospital where she was pronounced dead. Boduch could not immediately be reached by HuffPost.
It does sound like an abusive situation that the kids needed to be removed from.
However, it wasn’t the sandal that killed the child.
You can very easily beat a four year old to death with very little force.
And I could hit anyone with my car!
But what happened in this case was, a child was killed with a gun.
The car argument doesn’t help because we should also be getting rid of cars.
You can kill the child with a necktie and use the excuse “I didn’t know it was too tight, I was showing her how to tie a necktie!”
Why would a 4 year old girl need to know how to tie a necktie? Similarly, why would a 4 year old girl need to know “gun safety” especially when it is clearly not gun safety because you pressed a firearm (all should be treated as loaded) against her chest? Even without the gun, she could have taught “knife safety”, “blunt weapon safety”.
I’m telling you this is not done out of ignorance, NOBODY is that ignorant about firearms except for children themselves, this was done intentionally. If you have firearms in the house, you should teach your children to respect them in their presence because of the power they hold, but you shouldn’t even keep them in a place where they can access them, let alone handling one in personal proximity of one.
Even if she didn’t intentionally kill the child, she intentionally held the gun up to the child’s chest which was without a doubt something she would have done to scar the child. You people are arguing “she should have never had a gun because then she couldn’t hurt that child!” when the gun was just a tool. The root of the problem is that she should have never had the children in her house to BEGIN with.