ST. LOUIS — A St. Louis doctor is on a mission to get parents to secure their firearms and for criminals to put their guns down. The mission comes after three children were shot in the St. Louis region in just the last few days.
Dr. Meaghan Raney works in the emergency room and said she sees the tragedies no one wants to see.
"Nobody likes to tell a parent that their child is no longer here and they were taken because of gun violence,” Raney said.
A 9-year-old is lucky to be alive after being shot in the arm Wednesday. It follows days of shootings where the childhood victims didn't make it.
"I lost my momma to gun violence … my mom was shot in her head in front of me and my little brother,” Doriana Jefferson said.
She holds her 6-month-old son, Kingston, tight night after night. She does not keep a gun in her home.
"He's 6 months [old]. Sooner or later, he's going to be crawling and walking … he's already getting into everything. I can't even think about it being him,” she said.
In the past three days, three children have been impacted by gun violence.
On Wednesday, 9-year-old Jayceon Williams was struck in the arm while inside his home in Glasgow Village.
“They shot like 17 times but for no reason. My daughter didn't do anything to no one, nobody. We don't know why someone would shoot our house up,” his grandmother Janie Leggette said.
He survived. But, a 7-year-old boy in Berkeley and a 5-year-old girl in Belleville did not. Police say the 7-year-old shot himself when he found a loaded gun after being left alone in his grandfather's truck.
"Children are tricky and they get into everything so just keeping a gun hidden is not an effective way. A gun should always have a lock on it and kept separately from the ammunition itself,” Raney said.
She is urging area parents to get a gunlock. SSM Health gives them away for free.
"Fourteen-percent of the gunshot wounds we see are unintentional and 50% of those we saw in 2022 were under the age of 5,” she added.
"It's sad for someone to lose an innocent child to something that had nothing to do with them,” Jefferson said.
The gunlocks are available in the waiting room at SSM Health's emergency rooms and pediatric clinics. Officials there are also starting to deliver them to area fire stations for people who may not be able to get to the hospital.