They charged this 10-year-old boy with a felony, and you will be totally surprised at just why it happened in the first place…
This boy was charged with a class 5 felony because he pointed a nerf gun in the direction of an adult who had been driving at the time. Luckily, this has a happy ending for the boy’s family after the boy was arrested.
Stefanie Carter described how her son Gavin was outside playing “Fortnite” with his friend when the boy ended up handcuffed, transported to the local sheriff’s office, and charged with a felony simply because he was playing a character from that popular online video game. Both Gavin and his friend were arrested.
Gavin and his friend had a nerf crossbow and a toy rifle, and they were firing at passing vehicles. These could clearly be identified as toys because both of them had that trademark bright orange. However, the last person who they pointed the toy gun at wasn’t having it, and he slammed on his brakes and parked his truck and confronted the boys.
The man then began yelling at the boys, who ran into the friend’s grandparent’s house nearby.
The man continued to follow them and was yelling at an adult who answered the door. “The toy bow was an orange Nerf bow,” Gavin explained, admitting to Fox 21 News that he was “very scared” of how the man was behaving. “It didn’t work. Nothing could shoot out of it. Nothing would come out of it. The weapon, well, toy, I had had an orange tip. It was also broken and couldn’t shoot anything out of it.”
However, the driver of the truck was angry. “I don’t know what kind of gun it is. It was some kind of gun,” the unidentified man could be heard shouting in the doorbell camera footage, KOAA reported. There was a voice from inside the house that kept telling him to “watch his mouth” but he continued to yell. “How about this? How about I call the [expletive] cops?” he responded. And, that’s what he did.
El Paso County Sheriff’s Office Deputies arrived at Gavin’s home, and to the family’s shock they arrested the boys. They were handcuffed and the law enforcement officer drove them downtown to the Colorado Springs police station where they were fingerprinted and had mugshots. His mother said that the whole ordeal had Gavin in tears. “I told them I had no intention to have scared them or have any threat to their life,” the boy said.
Stefanie Carter and husband Chris followed the police to the station where their son was released by 10:30 p.m. that evening. The Carpenters described how the 4th Judicial District was adamant that they were going to pursue the charge of menacing, a class five felony. The family hired an attorney and finally decided that they would do a rehabilitation program where Gavin would be able to avoid a conviction.
“It was just a hard no, that the district attorney wasn’t going to throw this out,” Chris recalled. “That is when we moved into the diversion program.”
It was under this diversion program that they required Gavin to perform community service and submit an essay and his grades for the review of the court. It was more than seven months later that his felony record was expunged, his record was cleared, and Gavin learned an important lesson.
“He definitely admits that he pointed that weapon at cars, multiple cars, not just the one that stopped, and he now understands that’s wrong,” Christopher Carpenter said.
Of course, the elephant in the room would be whether it needed to come to this in the first place. A general statement from the El Paso County Sheriff’s says that the answer is a resounding yes. “There are times when it would be appropriate to charge menacing when a toy gun is involved,” the statement explained. “If someone knowingly places someone in fear of serious bodily injury or death, menacing would be appropriate,” the sheriff’s office added, and this is now what the Carpenters want to warn other parents about.
Needless to say, the Carpenters are happy that there is going to come a time where the husband, a lieutenant colonel in the Army, is eventually going to be transferred to another post.
“I can’t live in a state where my kids can’t be kids and play outside without being scared of being arrested,” she said. However, cases like this one aren’t unique to Colorado.
There was a similar case where a 6-year-old kindergartener with Down Syndrome was reported to the police after she pointed her finger at a teacher and said, “I shoot you.” They placed the child under investigation and her mother diligently fought the district policy that landed her daughter in hot water. She says that her daughter had become flustered and didn’t have the mental capacity to understand her actions.
There have been several other times that a NERF gun had been a subject of controversy as well. A New York-based consumer watchdog group wrote a letter of admonishment to Hasbro, the toymaker behind the NERF line of foam toy rifles, demanding that they “remove assault-style toy weapons” from their offerings, “demanding that they remove assault-style toy weapons” from their inventory. The letter from the Empire State Consumer Project told the company that “toy guns are one thing, but these emblems of mass destruction take them to the next, horrifying level.”