Officer, wife to face charges in child’s self-inflicted shooting

A Las Vegas police officer and his wife are facing felony charges after their 2-year-old son shot himself last month with his father's service weapon.

Jared Bledsoe and Shawnee Bledsoe, both 27, each face one count of child endangerment with substantial bodily harm.

The couple left their youngest son in a room where a loaded handgun was stored in a nightstand, an act that police deemed unsafe, according to a warrant released Monday by the Clark County district attorney's office.

"We believe that parents that have loaded firearms in their homes should secure them," Clark County District Attorney David Roger said.

State law requires parents to securely store their firearms.

The Bledsoes told investigators that they put their son, Jared Benjamin Bledsoe, to sleep in their master bedroom Feb. 6 while they played cards with friends in the kitchen of their Moapa Valley home, the warrant states.

The officer's service weapon, a .45-caliber Wilson 1911, was in the nightstand, the warrant says.

About half an hour after putting the boy to bed, they heard a gunshot in the master bedroom. When they ran inside, they found their wounded son on his back. The nightstand drawer was open.

Jared Bledsoe told detectives that he batted the gun off his son's chest and began applying pressure to the boy's abdomen. The bullet had gone into the boy's abdomen, through his small bowel, liver, transverse colon, diaphragm, lung and arm, according to the warrant.

He was hospitalized at University Medical Center in critical condition. Police said Monday that he was upgraded to stable condition.

In interviews with investigators, the Bledsoes expressed a need to have guns in the house for protection. Shawnee Bledsoe, who told police that her older sister was murdered at a young age, said she sometimes keeps a gun under her pillow at night when her husband is at work.

But they did not take precautions to lock or secure some of their weapons, according to the warrant.

Jared Bledsoe said he chose the Wilson handgun because it was safer than other firearms; it required the user to manipulate two safeties, instead of one, before firing. He said he didn't believe his son would be able to fire it.

The gun was usually left in the nightstand, which he kept closed. He did not know whether his 2-year-old and 4-year-old sons knew it was there, but "they're not to get into dad's things anyway," he told police, according to the warrant. His wife said the boys are taught "not to touch guns."

When police searched the bedroom, they found several other weapons, including another unsecured, loaded handgun in a green utility bag on the floor of the closet.

In an interview with detectives and his attorney, Bledsoe was asked by the attorney what his police academy training had taught him in reference to storing his duty weapon.

"Close to what they said was ... the safest place for a gun to be is locked up," he said. "But we also need to be able to be prepared."

He added: "They never said one way or another ... what's the wrong or right way. They just said there's a lot of different options. It needs to be secured."

The charge will cost Bledsoe his job with the department. Because he joined just last year, he was under the Metropolitan Police Department's probationary period while he underwent field training, department spokesman Jacinto Rivera said.

When the shooting happened, Bledsoe was placed on paid leave. Now that he has been charged with a felony, he will be either terminated or ruled "nonconfirmed," meaning he did not pass his field training and will be let go. That decision will be left to his supervisors, Rivera said.

Roger said police recommended the couple be summoned for a March 21 arraignment rather than arrested. He said his office concurred with that recommendation, and the two will not be booked into jail.

Roger said his office has a responsibility to protect children.

"These are always very difficult cases for us to prosecute simply because they're preventable accidents, and the family has been traumatized by it," he said.

Review-Journal writer Brian Haynes contributed to this report. Contact reporter Lawrence Mower at lmower@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0440.