Two cousins were left dead after playing with a gun on Livestream at a St. Louis birthday party. Cops are calling the shooting a murder-suicide.
CBS News reported, around 2 a.m. Friday, Kuaron Harvey, 14, and Paris Harvey, 12, were live on Instagram. The younger child was playing with a gun when it went off and killed her cousin — prompting her to shoot herself.
Initially, police described the tragic incident as a murder-suicide; however, the family said that was not the case.
“It was no murder. It wasn’t a suicide,” Paris’ distraught mother, Shinise Harvey, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “It was a freak accident. It happened.”
When the shooting occurred, she said relatives who saw the video said the pair was “trying to be too hip.”
Police informed the outlet that the cousins were found unresponsive at 2:07 a.m., and both were later pronounced dead at the scene.
“It wasn’t a situation where they were arguing or anything like that,” said Susan Dyson, the girl’s grandmother. “They were playing with a gun when they shouldn’t have been. Of course, they shouldn’t have been doing it.
“I think it just went off,” Dyson said. “It went off by mistake.”
She said the two were attending a birthday party for younger family members when they headed into the bathroom to film in front of the mirror. That’s when the deadly accident took place.
The two cousins were close enough to be like “brother and sister,” the family said. They often horsed around together, pulling pranks, rapping, or making videos.
“No matter how good we raise our kids they still are going to venture off,” Shinise Harvey told the Dispatch.
The results of the department’s investigation have not been released by the St. Louis police.
