Boy Honored for Knowing a Gun Is Not a Toy

By the time his mother spotted him, 4-year-old Josue Arriaga had picked up the big black .357 revolver lying in the grass outside his family’s East Los Angeles apartment.

He lifted the loaded gun and held it in his hands, readying to shoot.

The day had started like a typical summer morning for the Arriaga brothers, perfect for digging worms out of the garden, chasing bees or pulling ladybugs off the towering sunflowers in the front yard.

Then Josue’s big brother, 6-year-old Juan Carlos Arriaga, came up with another idea.

“Hey, let’s play policeman!” he said to Josue and their friend, Oscar Coronado, 9.

The three boys grabbed sticks from the frontyard and climbed up the steps of the apartment building to the upstairs balcony. They ran up and down the concrete floor, pretending to shoot at bad guys.

Soon Juan and Josue’s mother came out of the family’s downstairs apartment. “Come down, boys,” she called to the children. “You could fall up there.” She didn’t like it when they pretended to shoot guns.

The boys obeyed, dropped their sticks and came down the steps into the frontyard. Josue went to the back gate to pet the family’s three dogs. Oscar wandered over to the side of the yard, where something was gleaming under the small guava tree Juan’s parents had planted when he was born.

“Hey, look at what I found,” Oscar said excitedly.

He picked up a shiny handgun lying in the dirt.

From across the yard, Juan froze. As Oscar lifted the weapon, Juan could see bullets in the cylinder. He remembered what his parents always told him: never, ever, touch a gun.

“Oscar, Oscar, put it down!” Juan yelled. “That’s a real gun!”

Startled, the older boy dropped the weapon. Juan turned and raced into his apartment, where his mother was cleaning the living room.

“Mami, Mami, corrale!” he said. “Run quickly! We found a gun outside and it’s real!”

Angelica Arriaga looked at her son’s scared face and dashed out the door. In the yard, little Josue had picked up the revolver and was pointing it, poised to shoot.

“Sueltalo!” she cried.

“Let it go!” Juan yelled.

The 4-year-old stared at them and let the weapon fall to the grass. His mother swooped him up in an embrace as he started crying.

“Don’t tell the police,” he said, sobbing. “Don’t tell them I touched the gun or they’ll take me away.”

Juan looked at the revolver lying on the ground as his mother, teary-eyed, reached over and hugged him.

“Mami, it’s good I came and got you,” he said soberly. “An accident could have happened.”

When sheriff’s deputies arrived to take the weapon a little later, they told the family it had probably been dumped in the yard by two gang members who had been in a shootout with deputies the night before. The deputies had chased the men around the neighborhood throughout the night. When they finally caught them, their weapons were nowhere to be found.

“I was so scared just thinking of what could have happened,” Arriaga said. “It’s the worst thing a mother could imagine--your child finding a loaded weapon.”

A few days later, Capt. Thomas Angel, the head of the East Los Angeles sheriff’s station, heard from a detective how the 6-year-old reacted when he saw the gun. Juan needed to be recognized, the captain decided.

“This could have been a tragedy,” Angel said. “The fact that he realized the danger of this and took action shows there are kids and parents acting very responsibly.”

On Tuesday night, Juan was honored at a rally in East Los Angeles’ Belvedere Park held as part of National Night Out, a crime prevention program. The theme: keeping guns away from children.

Clutching the hand of a lieutenant, Juan stood on a stage as Angel, County Supervisor Gloria Molina and a representative for Assemblywoman Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) each presented the second-grader with a certificate of commendation.

Angel called him a hero. Molina told him she was very proud of him. The crowd of a few hundred people applauded.

Juan stood on his tiptoes to reach the microphone. “Thanks,” he said, clutching his certificates.

When he came off the stage, Josue ran up and hugged him.

“If something like this ever happens again,” Juan told his little brother, “I’m going to do the exact same thing.”