Indiana police officer, whose job was being broadcast live on cable televisionarrested a man after neighbors reported his young son wandering down an apartment hallway with a loaded gun, authorities said.
The footage was shown on “On Patrol: Live” by Reelz on Saturday night when Beech Grove police responded to a call about a child, wearing only a diaper, allegedly walking around unsupervised and pointing a firearm.
Officers spoke to a neighbor who called police and then to the boy’s father, Shane Osborne, 45, who said there was no weapon in his apartment, “Live” footage showed.
Four responding police officers were about to leave the building when another neighbor approached them and shared footage, taken from their doorbell camera, of an armed child in a diaper, “Live” showed.
“That’s absolutely hard to see,” he said. Sean “Sticks” Larkin, a retired police sergeant from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an analyst for “Live.” “You could clearly see the boy was pulling the tigger. If he had been loaded in the breech, it could have been a horrible, horrible situation.”
Officers immediately returned to Osborne’s apartment and eventually found a 9mm Smith & Wesson inside a locked desk, according to the Reelz show.
Curtis Wilson, a Richland County, South Carolina, deputy sheriff and another “Live” analyst, said he doubts the boy randomly placed the gun on that desk.
“The way it was placed on this dresser, the way it was strategically placed there and from top to bottom, it’s unlikely that a small child could do that,” he said.
Osborne was booked on suspicion of gross neglect of a clerk, police records showed. His first court appearance is scheduled for Thursday afternoon, according to the Marion County District Attorney’s Office.
Before the firearm was found, Osborne had told cameras that he cannot possess guns as an ex-convict.
The father’s criminal history includes convictions for fraud and receiving stolen property, state records showed.
It was not immediately clear Tuesday whether Osborne had retained or been assigned an attorney. A call to his cell phone went to voicemail.
This arrest in Indiana came just over a week after a 6-year-old Virginia boy opened fire on his first-grade teacher.
Larkin said the Indiana incident could easily have ended in tragedy.
“There’s a point where he’s holding it and literally, it almost looks like (the gun) is pointed at his own face,” he said.
Added Larkin: “We hear these kinds of stories where kids find themselves, find these firearms, these horrible outcomes that happen sometimes. But seeing it on video is definitely very different.”