An toddler in Amarillo continues to fight to recover after he shot himself in the head in March.
Now, his grandmother is speaking out about the boy’s condition and what she hopes people learn from the incident.
The night of the accident, Grandma Penny Clark says she was left completely speechless.
“There for a minute, I just quite breathing,” said Clark. “I didn’t want to breathe no more.”
During a telephone call with her son explaining what happened, one word stood out.
“All I heard was shot,” said Clark, “And I hung up, took off, got to the house, and I’m like ‘where are my grandchildren?'”
The Grandma says that she wasn’t able to learn much information at the scene. It wasn’t until later at the hospital that she saw the extent of what had happened to her grandson.
“It was point blank range. You could see pretty much the imprint of the barrel on his forehead,” she said.
The boy’s father had set the gun down after plans to go shooting with his friends were canceled. He made dinner for his children and accidentally fell asleep.
This is when the child grabbed the gun and accidentally discharged it.
Clark says that her grandson has been tough through it all.
“I just wanted him to know Grandma was proud of him. The way he has worked at everything, the way he has progressed, the way that he’s let everybody do things that he’s let them do,” she said. “I mean, ’cause he could have been a little stinker and fought them tooth and nail…but he follows through right with them when they tell him to do something.”
Grandma Penny says that she hopes her family’s story urges people to take extra precautions with weapons.
“What I want to enforce is everybody to please, if you own a gun, put a trigger lock on it,” she said. “Because that right there, if he would have done that, that would have stopped the whole thing.”
For now, she’s just so thankful to hold her family close.
“I have seven grandkids. I love each and every one of them. This has made me realize I live by that. [I] don’t let them leave without a hug and a kiss and ‘I love you.’ Well, sometimes they’re lucky if they get two hugs and kisses and ‘I love you,‘” said Clark.
The Clark family is now asking for donations to help ease medical expenses and keep their home.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here.