Dad first to be hit with new gun law after daughter, 2, shoots herself in face

A Michigan felon is facing up to life in prison after his 2-year-old daughter shot herself in the face with a loaded revolver found at home alongside a semi-automatic pistol.

Michael Tolbert, 44, was hit with a slew of charges, including the very first use of a state “safe storage” gun law that was implemented just a day before his daughter’s near-fatal shooting.

He had been interviewed by cops after rushing daughter Skye McBride, who was just over 2, to a Flint hospital on Valentine’s Day, Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton announced Tuesday.

Cops got a warrant for their home and found “blood and brain matter” in a bedroom next to a child-size folding chair, the prosecutor said.

“There were two firearms located on the bed,” Leyton said — a revolver and a semi-automatic pistol.

“Both were unsecured and loaded with live ammunition,” he said. “There were no gun locks or safes inside of this front bedroom.”

A single shot was fired from the revolver, with a bullet hole found in the ceiling, the prosecutor said.

“The bullet entered the right eye of the little girl and exited through the rear of her skull,” Leyton said.

“Doctors have said she will lose her right eye at best,” he said, noting she remained in critical condition as of Tuesday.

Little Skye’s aunt, LaDorothy Griggs, said the “most happy, funny, beautiful, loving, and sweetest” girl was “fighting, so very hard for her life.”

“She is her mom’s only child and as you can imagine the family is struggling to process this as our world has been thrown into a whirlwind,” the aunt wrote in an online fundraiser. “Life is going to be extremely different for Skye.”

The dad was arraigned on “multiple counts related to the shooting of a child,” Leyton said, including lying to a police officer, being a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition and first-degree child abuse, a felony which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, Leyton said.

He also became the first person charged under Michigan’s “safe storage” law, which went into effect a day before the shooting. The law requires gun owners to store unattended firearms unloaded and locked if there is a “reasonable” expectation that a child could access the weapons.

Sentences for “safe storage” violations range between just over three months in jail and up to 15 years in state prison, depending on how the child who accessed the gun used it, according to the Detroit News.

Democratic state Sen. Kristen McDonald-Rivet, who co-sponsored the new legislation, said at Tuesday’s news conference that it gives prosecutors the tools to hold irresponsible gun owners accountable for their actions.

“I did not ever dream that within days of the law going into effect, we would need it, but here we are,” she said.