Indiana Man Is Arrested After Video Shows Child Playing With Gun

An Indiana man was arrested after his 4-year-old son was seen playing with a gun in doorbell camera footage that was broadcast on live television on Saturday as part of a program that follows police departments.

The footage showed a child clad only in a diaper waving a gun in an apartment hallway. The child appeared to pull the gun’s trigger several times, though the gun did not discharge, and pointed it at several doors inside the apartment complex in Beech Grove, Ind., a suburb of Indianapolis.

The distressing scene was broadcast just weeks after a first-grade student in Virginia shot a teacher with a 9-millimeter handgun.

In footage from the television show “On Patrol: Live,” a neighbor who had called 911 tells officers from the Beech Grove Police Department that her son had opened the door and seen the boy with a handgun, then closed the door and told his family about the child. The mother tells the police that she saw the boy through the peephole and knew he was holding a real gun, because she sells firearms.

Officers are then seen entering the boy’s father’s apartment. The father denies that a gun is inside and says that he had been sick and spent the day sleeping. The police leave the apartment, return to the neighbor who called 911 and tell her they could not find anything. Another neighbor then shows officers footage on her mobile phone from a doorbell camera clearly showing the boy playing with a gun in the shared hallway. More clips from the doorbell camera footage are broadcast later in the show.

The police return to the father’s apartment and find a firearm in a desk that an officer identifies on camera as a Smith & Wesson 9-millimeter handgun. The father is arrested. “On Patrol: Live” said in a news release that the gun had been loaded.

Chief Michael Maurice of the Beech Grove Police Department said in an email that the boy’s father, Shane Osborne, 45, was arrested and charged with neglect of a dependent, a felony. The child was released back to his mother, Chief Maurice said.

Chief Maurice said that child welfare authorities had been notified of the episode and that the final charges would be determined by the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office. A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, Michael Leffler, said the office was still investigating.

Mr. Osborne is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday, prosecutors said. A lawyer for Mr. Osborne did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The search for the gun was also shown on “On Patrol: Live,” which is broadcast on Reelz, a cable network, and has camera crews follow police officers on duty and then broadcasts the footage live, or after a short delay. The Beech Grove Police Department is one of eight departments currently featured on the show, according to a news release.

“On Patrol: Live” footage can be delayed from a few minutes to up to 20 to 30 so that the footage can be edited for a number reasons, including to protect the identities of undercover officers or informants, to address “extremely violent and traumatic incidents,” or to protect children, according to the show’s website.

A message shown onscreen during Saturday’s episode said that the search for the gun had unfolded “just prior to air.” A spokeswoman for “On Patrol: Live” did not provide a more specific timeline.

The footage of the child in Indiana playing with the gun was aired less than two weeks after a 6-year-old in Newport News, Va., shot a teacher with a handgun that the authorities said had come from his home and had been legally purchased by his mother.

The United States is an extreme outlier when it comes to child gun violence, and in 2020 guns became the leading cause of death for American children. Younger children account for a growing share of that death toll. A July 2022 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the United States accounted for 46 percent of the child population among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes most of the world’s advanced economies, but 97 percent of child gun deaths in those nations.

Researchers who study gun violence say it is difficult to explain why the rate of gun deaths among children has risen, but emphasize that the increased availability of guns has most likely played a role.