Kids were ‘playing guns’ alone in home when 4-year-old fatally shot 7-year-old
A group of children were alone inside a southeast Wichita apartment earlier this month when a 4-year-old found a loaded gun and fired it at a 7-year-old boy, accidentally killing him while their moms and other relatives drank tequila in a car outside.
Tasha D. Dillard, the 25-year-old resident of the apartment where the shooting occurred, is now charged with first-degree felony murder in the death of 7-year-old Davion Gunter Jr. after the children told police the firearm came from Dillard’s purse. She is also charged with multiple counts of aggravated endangering of a child. Dillard has denied having a gun that night, court records say. She “is contesting the charges against her,” her lawyer wrote in a March 25 request to reduce her $500,000 bond.
A probable cause affidavit released by a Sedgwick County judge this week gives new details about what happened at the Planeview neighborhood apartment, in the 3700 block of East Ross Parkway, leading up to the deadly shooting. Wichita police have said previously that officers called to the shooting at 12:26 a.m. March 16 found Davion bleeding from a gunshot wound to the chest. The boy later died at a Wichita hospital where he was taken for treatment.
The affidavit says several children, all under age 10, were alone in the apartment when Davion was shot. The adults were all outside.
The 4-year-old told police the children were ‘playing guns’ when the shooting happened and that he had found the gun in Dillard’s purse as it sat unattended on a kitchen counter, according to the affidavit. He told police he had either seen or been involved in playing “with fake guns in the past” and that after finding the weapon, he followed Davion into Dillard’s bedroom. That’s where the gun discharged.
Other children told police some of them had played with “an orange toy gun earlier in the night,” had posed with Dillard’s gun before the shooting and thought it was also a toy, the affidavit says. One child told police Dillard has the gun “because she is scared of a man named ‘B’” and that she keeps it “in her purse in the closet or on the table,” according to the affidavit.
The children ran out of the apartment after the shooting to find the adults. One of the women went in and then carried Davion outside, the affidavit says.
Dillard told police that before the shooting, she had spent most of the day consuming alcohol and was hosting a small party for a few friends at her apartment when “the adults went out to the parking lot to continue drinking,” according to the affidavit.
Another woman told police she and other stopped by after seeing a movie and that the kids wanted to play inside while the adults “stayed in the car and had a few shots of tequila.”
In her interview with law enforcement, Dillard denied owning guns or having any in the apartment and told police “her children know to leave guns alone,” according to the affidavit. She said the children were wrong about her carrying a gun in her purse and claimed that a friend had briefly had a firearm at her house earlier in the day, which she held and posed with for a SnapChat video because she wanted to “look cute,” the affidavit says.
But, she claimed, she hadn’t seen that gun since the friend left with it.
Dillard’s next court date is March 31. Her court-appointed lawyer did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
