Melvin Andre Clark Jr. of Fayetteville, North Carolina is being charged with involuntary manslaughter as well as possession of a firearm by a convicted felon after his two-year-old daughter shot herself fatally which resulted in her death. At just nineteen years old Melvin has had several run-ins with the law and “had been sentenced on convictions of breaking and entering, larceny and possession of a firearm by a minor.” When arrested, police found several outstanding warrants when running Clark’s name such as “misdemeanor cruelty to animals, larceny, and marijuana possession charges.” Police report that two-year-old Samarri Tyana Beauford was playing in the living room of her aunt and grandmother’s home when she found a loaded .22 caliber pistol that her father had left underneath the couch. Although the police refused to disclose information on where the two-year-old shot herself, he does say that “a child that small, they don’t have the strength to pull a trigger with their index finger, but they are strong enough to use pressure from their two thumbs. Typically, they’ll be looking at the weapon when these things happen.” Clark is currently being held in the Cumberland County Detention Center on a $50,000 secured bond and his case will continue on November 7th since no attorney was assigned to his case.
This is a really unfortunate situation, and it seems that as of lately there have been a lot of incidents in the news reporting on infants and toddlers being killed by relatives or accidently by themselves because of a lack of supervision. This saddens me because with each of these cases that means the child who has died will not be able to live out all of their potential. We’ll never know the great things they could have been capable of doing for this earth. Life is a precious thing and I’ll never be able to understand how anyone can take the life of another person, especially an infant or a toddler. Although the father in this particular story is young, he still should have known better than to leave the gun in a child’s reach, and the child should have never been unattended while playing in the living room.