The smallest victims: Why does America keep allowing toddlers to shoot themselves?

It was nearly 3 a.m. when LaDorothy Griggs was jolted awake by the banging on her front door. She was still in the haze of sleep when her uncle rushed into her home. 

“Skye’s been shot,” he said. “Skye’s been shot in the head.”

Griggs couldn’t stop screaming, jumping up and down, even after her uncle said they had to get to the hospital and see if her 3-year-old niece was still alive. 

By the time they pulled up to Hurley Medical Center on Feb. 15, Skye McBride had already undergone emergency surgery for the bullet that ripped through her right eye and out the top of her head.

Skye’s hair was shaved where the surgeon had removed a piece of her skull, and her small body was hooked up to tubes and wires in every direction. “I couldn’t even stand to look at her,” Griggs said. A nurse said that Skye might not survive the night.

As the hours stretched on in the waiting room, no one — not Skye’s relatives, not the doctors, not the police the family spoke to at the hospital — could explain how she had gotten hurt. 

Skye had been shot the previous day — Valentine’s Day — around 7 p.m. Her father, Michael Tolbert, 45, drove her to the hospital, where he told police that she had been hit during a drive-by shooting. 

But when officers pulled up to his Flint home before midnight, they found no evidence that such a shooting had happened, according to a police report. Instead, they followed a trail of blood up the driveway, through the house’s entryway, to Tolbert’s cluttered bedroom, where blood soaked the floor next to a toddler-sized folding chair. 

On the bed, beside a red-and-white balloon, police found two loaded weapons: a semiautomatic pistol and a revolver with an empty bullet casing in the chamber. There was a single bullet hole in the ceiling. 

This clearly wasn’t a drive-by shooting, police concluded. But it did fit another pattern, one that unfolds too often across America: curious young children picking up guns and unintentionally firing them, often with catastrophic consequences. Investigators found that Tolbert had left the loaded revolver on his bed, police told her relatives the next day. While her father was in another room, they said, Skye had grabbed the revolver, held it with the barrel pointing toward her face, and pulled the trigger. 

As Skye lay unconscious in a hospital bed in the days that followed — with doctors telling her family that even if she survived, she might never speak or walk again — local officials prepared to make a major announcement. 

The day before Skye shot herself, Michigan’s new firearms storage law went into effect. The measure made it a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison if a gun is left unsecured and a child finds it and injures or kills someone. Skye’s father would be the first person charged under the law. 

“I did not ever dream that within days of the law going into effect, we would need it,” state Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, said at the news conference announcing the charges, six days after the shooting. “But here we are.”

Tolbert’s attorney, Major J.C. White, said in a statement that his client was entitled to a presumption of innocence and that the police’s version of events was “in dispute.”

Despite America’s deep divide on guns, everyone seems willing to agree that no toddler should be able to find a loaded, unsecured weapon and fire it. Unlike so many other types of gun violence that plague the U.S., this appears, on paper, to be a solvable problem. There is a broad consensus that people who own firearms ought to store them properly to limit children’s access to them — a rare patch of common ground between the gun industry and gun control advocates. 

And yet, a person is injured or killed nearly every day in America because a child has unintentionally fired a gun, according to reports from 2015 to 2022 compiled by Everytown, an advocacy group for firearm safety. And children under 6 are among the most likely victims. 

The crisis shows just how intractable even the most preventable forms of gun violence can be.

Americans are buying a record number of guns, largely to defend themselves and their families. Many do not keep their firearms unloaded and locked up, according to recent surveys — in part because they believe they need to keep their weapons at the ready, not hidden away in gun safes. 

But that makes it easier for children to fire loaded weapons they weren’t supposed to touch. And U.S. policymakers are at odds over how to prevent such shootings from happening. 

Congressional Democrats have repeatedly introduced sweeping measures to restrict who can buy guns and govern how they should be stored. These bills have failed to advance, stymied by opposition from more conservative lawmakers, Second Amendment advocates and gun lobbyists. Gun control advocates have turned, instead, to more modest measures. Michigan is now one of 26 states with safe storage laws, holding gun owners criminally liable if children get ahold of their unsecured firearms. The U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory this week declaring firearm violence a “public health crisis,” with recommendations that included requiring safe storage of guns.

But there is only limited evidence that these state laws — which vary in how stringent they are — reduce unintentional injuries and deaths or convince gun owners to change their behavior, especially since many aren’t aware that the requirements exist. And gun rights groups have continued to resist safe storage requirements, arguing owners should be able to make the choice themselves — not the government.

Safe storage laws may be an intervention that’s too small to stop the problem, and yet too large a change to win universal support — exactly the type of unsatisfactory middle ground one might expect in a country at war over the Second Amendment. 

David Leyton, Genesee County’s prosecutor, still believes it’s worth trying. When he got the call about Skye McBride, he knew that he needed to bring the charge against her father — and try to make an example of him.“I don’t believe it’s going to happen overnight,” said Leyton, who spent years lobbying for Michigan to pass a safe storage law. “But if it saves one life, then it’s a good law.”

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Skye, the youngest of Pam Williams’ eight grandchildren, never had trouble grabbing her family’s attention. “The baby, the princess, the queen,” said Williams, a 56-year-old Flint native.

Before the shooting, Skye and her mother, Donetta McBride, lived at Williams’ home across the street from a newly remodeled Walmart. (McBride declined to be interviewed.)

Skye spent most days with her grandmother, whose white-sided house was a hub for all the grandkids. But she often begged to spend the night with her four cousins at Griggs’ house nearby. A single mother, 31-year-old Griggs was always in motion — getting to her current job while interviewing for a better one, rushing to make her oldest daughter’s track meet before scooping up her niece and tucking everyone in at bedtime. Skye’s parents shared custody, but she seldom saw Tolbert, whose relationship with her mother had ended, Griggs and Williams said. Her father’s attorney disputed that description and said that Tolbert “believes he has a good relationship with Skye and her mother.” 

Not long after Skye’s second birthday, in October 2022, Tolbert was arrested on drug and firearm charges that could land him in prison for decades. He posted bail after his arrest and ultimately pleaded guilty in January.

As Valentine’s Day approached, while he was awaiting sentencing, Tolbert mentioned that he wanted a visit with Skye. Williams and Griggs said they had always been wary of Tolbert and worried about Skye’s safety on the rare occasions that she was in his care. But neither of them knew about the 2022 charges — or about the weapons that police would later say he was keeping at home.

Skye had just put on her new pink cowboy boots when her father showed up at her grandmother’s house around 4 p.m., Williams said. Skye clambered into the backseat of the blue Chevy Trailblazer, and they drove to her father’s home on Flint’s north side, a small brick house that had been painted silver and sat next to an empty lot. Tolbert later told police that he had stashed a gun under his pillow, according to a police affidavit. About three hours after he picked Skye up, he said that he left his daughter alone in his bedroom and went to the bathroom and kitchen. 

Then he heard a single shot. 

The gun Skye had fired was a compact Smith & Wesson revolver, the prosecutor said, which at 6 inches long is small enough that the 3-year-old might have mistaken it for a toy. Unlike many semiautomatic pistols with lighter trigger pulls, this type of revolver typically requires so much pressure to fire — roughly equivalent to yanking a 10-pound weight with a string — that it would have been extremely difficult for a toddler to pull the trigger, according to two gun experts who reviewed the case for NBC News. 

Leyton’s office sent the gun to be tested and analyzed, partly to figure out how Skye had managed to fire it. The gun experts who spoke to NBC News had a theory: The design of the revolver allows it to be fired in two ways. The one that requires far more force is to pull the trigger, which cocks the hammer — aligning the loaded chamber with the barrel of the gun — and then fires the bullet. The other method is to manually pull back the hammer, leaving the gun in a cocked position, where it needs only a light squeeze of the trigger to fire.If the revolver that Skye picked up was cocked — which the experts said would be an extremely risky way to leave it unattended — the gun would have been easy for her to fire accidentally. 

The 38 mm round pierced Skye’s right eye, severing a large artery in her brain and causing a massive stroke before it exited the top of her head, said Dr. Christian Bowers, a neurosurgeon at Hurley Medical Center. By the time she arrived at the hospital, he said, “she was really about as bad off as you could be.” 

Bowers performed an emergency craniotomy, removing about a third of her skull to relieve the rapidly increasing pressure. The bone was studded with metal fragments from the shattered bullet casing.“We never judge anyone’s behavior or actions” while treating patients, the surgeon said. “But there shouldn’t be bullets hitting children for any reason.” 

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Days after the shooting, Skye’s condition had stabilized, but she remained unconscious in a medication-induced coma to rest her body. 

The only sign of movement was the occasional twitch of a finger. Nurses insisted it was just a side effect of the medication, which the doctors were slowly lowering in hopes that she would wake up.

Then, just before the end of February, nurses in Skye’s room were wishing each other “good morning” — and were taken aback to see her right hand give a little wave. 

“That’s when I really knew,” Griggs said. “She might be coming back.”

Little by little, Skye started to make other movements — a toe wiggle, a hand squeeze, a head shake, and then, amazingly, a full thumbs-up. When she finally opened her good eye, on the left side, she gave a tiny smile. Her family was astounded and relieved. Still, doctors warned that Skye could have severe limitations. She wasn’t moving her left arm or leg because of the stroke. There was no knowing what kind of cognitive impairment she might have. She couldn’t speak or eat normally because of the tube inserted into her trachea to help her breathe — and she might have to rely on that kind of tube for years.

Skye’s mother, grandmother and aunt camped out in shifts, knowing Skye was used to having someone next to her when she fell asleep; relatives of Skye’s father visited as well. Griggs quit a new customer service job at a lawn care company that she had just started — the first one in months with reasonable hours and pay — to help her family manage it all.

Staying with Skye at the hospital meant spending money on takeout meals and hotel rooms. The family launched a GoFundMe to help with the expenses and worried about future medical bills. Friends, neighbors and strangers who’d seen Skye on the local news filled her hospital room with stuffed animals and “Paw Patrol” toys.Griggs forced herself to watch a video of the news conference that local officials held after Skye’s shooting, grimacing as they described the scene in Tolbert’s bedroom in bloody detail. 

There was one moment that she could far too easily picture: Skye wandering over to her father’s bed and picking up a gun, simply because it was lying there.  

“You can tell her, ‘Don’t touch this right now,’ and she’ll still do it,” Griggs said. “That’s the kind of kid she was — she was curious. She’s 3. That’s what they do.”

Before Skye, there was 3-year-old Karmelo Johnson, who died in 2016 after apparently shooting himself with a pistol he found in his great-grandparents’ Flint home. Two years later, a Flint preschooler accidentally shot herself in the hand after she looked in a closet for a toy and found a loaded gun instead. 

“I’ve just seen too much,” said Leyton, who’s served as Genesee County prosecutor since 2004. In any given year, he estimated there were five or six unintentional shootings by children — whether it was a toddler who found a weapon under a bed or a teenager who accidentally shot his friend while fooling around with a gun he thought was unloaded. 

In the Detroit area, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy counted 34 incidents from 2020 to 2022 in which children had accessed guns that weren’t properly stored and shot themselves or others.

A child “is no longer living, all because an adult did not safely secure that weapon, and to me that was just outrageous,” she said, recalling a horrific incident in which a 9-year-old died after his sister grabbed her father’s loaded shotgun from an unlocked closet and mimicked the video game they were just playing. 

For years, Leyton and Worthy regularly charged the adults whose weapons had been used in such shootings with gross negligence, involuntary manslaughter, child abuse and other crimes — sometimes facing criticism for going after grieving parents who were already suffering the loss of their children.Still, the shootings kept happening, month after month — a 5-year-old boy who shot himself in Detroit, a 15-year-old girl accidentally shot by another teenager in Bay City, according to reports. And local prosecutors became convinced that Michigan could do more to stop them.

For decades, public officials, safety advocates and gun industry groups have stressed the importance of securing firearms around children. They’ve given out millions of gun locks and pamphlets, exhorting gun owners to be responsible and children to run away if they ever find a gun when they’re on their own. 

Some states decided it wasn’t enough. In 1989, Florida became the first state to hold gun owners criminally liable for failing to secure their firearms if a child gains access to the weapon. More than a dozen states passed similar safe storage laws in the 1990s. By the end of the decade, major handgun manufacturers had agreed to provide child-safety locks for free with their firearms. Then in 2005, Congress passed a law requiring all handguns purchased at licensed dealers to be sold with a gun storage or safety device.

More gun owners with children are storing their weapons securely now, compared to years prior, some surveys have found. However, since gun ownership has risen sharply in recent years, there are still just as many children living in households with unsecured firearms now as in 2015 — about 4.6 million, researchers have found. And there are signs that unintentional shootings by children are again on the rise.All this has led gun control advocates to make a renewed push for safe storage laws, viewing the measures as more politically palatable than restricting the types of weapons that Americans are able to buy, or who is able to purchase them. Six more states have adopted safe storage laws since the beginning of 2021. Securing firearms would not only keep children from accessing them, proponents say, but could also help prevent theft, suicide and mass shootings.

But these measures have continued to prompt a backlash from many gun rights advocates — and the issue remains highly partisan. 

In Michigan, it wasn’t until Democrats took control of the state Legislature in 2023 that lawmakers moved forward with a safe storage bill — a proposal prompted in part by a 2021 mass shooting at a Michigan high school carried out by a teenager who used his family’s unsecured handgun. 

The state GOP fought the measure, tweeting an image comparing gun control to the Holocaust hours before the bill passed. Gun rights advocates criticized the proposal for undermining their ability to defend themselves. “Am I supposed to say ‘HOLD ON, LET ME GET MY GUN, LET ME UNLOCK MY GUN AND NOW I NEED MY AMMO,’” David Johnson, president of the Upper Peninsula Sportsmen’s Alliance, said in written testimony.At the same time, it’s unclear whether Michigan’s law will convince more gun owners to lock their firearms away. 

A growing body of research suggests that state safe storage laws are linked to a lower rate of unintentional child injuries and deaths. However, it’s not certain whether the laws themselves are driving the change, or whether states that pass them are seeing other shifts making these shootings less likely, said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. 

“The evidence is suggestive that maybe this works, but there are these caveats,” he said.   

The gun industry argues that the better and less intrusive approach is to educate more gun owners about safety measures, including gun safes and gun locks and keeping their weapons separate from ammunition. Other groups encourage parents to ask friends and family if they have unsecured weapons before letting their children visit.

Michael Anestis, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University, has found evidence that gun owners are more likely to support safe storage practices if they hear the message from those they trust.

But ultimately, Anestis said, the only realistic goal is reducing the risk — not eliminating it.

“We have more firearms than we have people in the country,” he said. “The only path to better outcomes is harm reduction because there’s no way that there aren’t firearms.”

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It took Skye just over three weeks to start talking again. 

Her name. Her age. And now, what color did she want her nails to be?

“Pink,” she whispered, as a speech therapist covered the opening where the breathing tube was still inserted in her trachea. 

After undergoing another surgery to remove the remains of her right eye — which doctors said could be replaced with a prosthetic, painted hazel to match the left one — Skye moved to a rehab facility at Children’s Hospital of Michigan in Detroit, an hour away from Flint. The nurses, doctors and therapists there all said the same thing when they stepped out of the room. “A miracle,” they told her family. 

About a month after the shooting, she was speaking full sentences and eagerly reaching for solid food. “Yummy in my tummy,” she told Williams as she nibbled on a cinnamon roll. By Easter, Skye was trying to push her own wheelchair. She squealed with joy whenever a loved one came to visit. The moment they stepped out of view, she craned her neck around. “Nana, where you at?” 

It was the Skye they all knew: bubbly, funny, endless energy. “You comin’ back, girl!” Griggs exclaimed during a video call, watching Skye shimmying on her hospital bed, trying to dance.

“The younger the children are, the better they do,” said Bowers, the neurosurgeon who operated on Skye. “She can rewire the brain in a lot of ways.”Skye’s rapid progress meant that she was released to go home months earlier than expected — at the end of April instead of July — after yet another surgery to replace the piece of skull that had been removed. She is learning to walk again, and her family says she is largely still herself, acting silly and giggling constantly.

No one knows, though, what the long-term damage will be to her brain or body, if she’ll be able to walk or run the way she used to, or use her left hand. 

Then there are all the follow-up doctor’s appointments, hospital visits and therapy sessions — rehab work that Williams tries to continue in their living room. 

“Pick up lefty,” her grandmother said, coaxing Skye to move her weak hand on its own, while they sat together in early May. “Good job, lefty.” Skye gave her own hand a kiss. Her father is still in jail. He has pleaded not guilty to charges that include first-degree child abuse, illegal weapons possession, and lying to a peace officer, in addition to violating the safe storage law. 

At a custody hearing in early April, Tolbert sat down and couldn’t stop weeping, according to Williams. No trial date has been set on the charges linked to Skye’s shooting, and he is still awaiting sentencing on the 2022 charges. 

Meanwhile, the shootings keep happening.

In mid-April, an 8-year-old in Warren, Michigan, outside of Detroit, climbed up to get his father’s handgun from the top of a kitchen cabinet and unintentionally shot himself in the head, police said, sending him to the hospital in critical condition; he is recovering. A month later, another Flint toddler found a loaded gun and shot himself in the head, just a short drive from Tolbert’s house. The 2-year-old was rushed to the same hospital that treated Skye. 

This time, the child didn’t survive. 

Griggs knows she wants to do more to stop this from happening — talk to kids at school, pass a new law, something. She’s just not sure what.

Because Griggs knows America isn’t going to get rid of all the guns. She’s thinking of getting one herself to protect her family, feeling vulnerable as a woman living alone with young children. She’ll make a decision as soon as she has the bandwidth for safety training. 

Regardless, she wants to ensure the kids know what to do if they see a gun — Skye included. 

“I want to teach her now,” Griggs said. “Don’t touch another one.”

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So far, Skye hasn’t shown any sign that she remembers what happened on Valentine’s Day. 

Doctors have advised Skye’s family to follow her lead and let her ask questions when she’s ready. But it’s now been months, and still — nothing. 

So in early May, Griggs worked up the courage to ask her, very gently, what happened to her eye.“I went to the doctor,” Skye said. Griggs tried again, asking if she hurt herself at her father’s house.

“No,” Skye told her aunt. 

But the local news keeps showing photos of Tolbert, resurfacing the case whenever another child fires another unsecured weapon.“That’s my dad,” Skye told her grandmother in late May, then became even more excited when her own photo came up on the TV screen. 

“Nana,” she said afterward. “Play me on the news again.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• How to store guns safely to prevent unintentional shootings
• Surgeon general declares firearm violence a public health crisis in landmark announcement
• House GOP takes the worst-of-all-worlds options on gun violence