In the second case, in Montgomery County, a 3-year-old girl was taken to a hospital Tuesday with what appeared to be self-inflicted injuries in Montgomery Village. Police are investigating how the child accessed the gun.
The children suffered wounds that did not appear to be life-threatening.
According to Everytown for Gun Safety, there were three unintentional shootings involving children in Maryland in 2023. Nationwide, unintentional shootings involving children increased from 350 in 2015 to 411 in 2023.
Few details were available in the Montgomery County case as of Tuesday evening, and no one was charged. But in Prince George’s, police arrested Jayvon Thomas, 20, of Cheverly, on multiple gun charges, including allegedly possessing the gun and leaving it unsecured in the shooting from Sunday. Thomas is in custody at the county jail and was ordered to remain held pending trial after a hearing Tuesday.
Thomas was at his home in Cheverly when police were called to his apartment for a reported shooting at 10:45 p.m., Prince George’s police said. Officers found a girl younger than 5 with a single gunshot wound, and she was taken to a hospital, police said.
According to an initial investigation, police said the gun “accidentally discharged” after the girl found the loaded weapon. As police investigated, they later found the gun inside a toilet tank in the home, according to charging documents. One witness told police they saw Thomas walk the 9mm handgun toward the back of the home, where the bathroom is located, the documents said.
Outside the apartment, officers also found a spent casing that Thomas said he moved from inside the home, according to charging documents; he denied involvement with the gun found in the toilet. When detectives asked if his DNA would be on the gun, he told them “maybe,” according to the documents.
An attorney listed in D.C. court records for Thomas declined to comment.
Thomas was prohibited from having a gun based on his previous criminal history, which included a misdemeanor in which he was convicted of illegal possession of ammunition and two juvenile cases, according to court documents.
He also had been arrested in January in the fatal shooting of a Maryland boxer in D.C. At his April 8 preliminary hearing, Superior Court Judge Robert Okun — after determining federal prosecutors failed to provide thorough evidence of Thomas’s probable guilt in the case — ordered Thomas released from jail and placed him on home confinement.
Patricia Hartman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., said Thomas was “released over our objection.” She declined to comment further.
Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy (D) said after Thomas’s bail review hearing in Maryland that it would have been the right decision for Thomas to be held in D.C. on the murder charge.
“Now that he is here and we believe was in possession of an un-serialized ghost gun that a minor child was able to get possession of and harm herself, this is not someone that we believe can be in our community safely,” Braveboy said.
Law enforcement officials have been lamenting the increasing prevalence of ghost guns and their use in violent crimes nationwide. The parts for the homemade weapons can be easily acquired online and difficult for investigators to track after they’ve been used in a crime, unlike other manufactured guns that have serial numbers that can often be traced to their last owner.
From 2016 to 2021, there were more than 45,200 suspected privately made firearms that law enforcement officials recovered from potential crime scenes, including in nearly 700 homicides or attempted homicides, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.