5-Year-Old Justin Knew Exactly Where the Gun Was

Justin Roberts, 5, was plenty mad at those tattletales across the street. So he pointed his mother’s gun at them.

“That’s not a real gun,” said Samantha Dizer and Brandon Howard, 8 and 6.

Justin lowered his aim toward the ground and pulled the trigger.

It was real, all right.

No one said much about it. The police came a few days later and took a report, but said no crime had occurred. Justin’s mother, Amber Roberts, gave them the gun.

Then, in faraway Michigan, Kayla Rolland was shot by a classmate in her first-grade classroom. Suddenly a lot of people seemed interested in Justin’s temper tantrum.

Newspapers wrote about it. TV crews came. Justin’s family moved away.

His mother had told police she thought the gun was well hidden. She kept it unloaded, atop a six-foot-high cabinet in her bedroom.

But Justin knew where it was.

To Samantha and Brandon, whom he alternately fought with and played with, Justin said: I have a real gun, you know.

No you don’t, they said.

So he showed them. It was Feb. 23, six days before Kayla died.

Justin went inside. His mother was busy. He moved furniture over to her cabinet, climbed up, got the gun and its ammunition clip.

He knew how to load it, he told police later, from watching TV.

The police came on Feb. 28, after Samantha’s mother finally heard about Justin’s actions and called them. Brandon’s mother, to whom the children tattled right away, figured it was a toy gun.

“They’re always tattling on each other,” she said. “They told me Justin was aiming a gun at them. They never even said he shot the gun.”

The incident turned Samantha’s mother into a bit of an activist. She’s appeared on television, and stayed in the face of police, urging them not to brush the case aside.

“I think there’s a major problem in our society,” Tabitha Dizer said, “if it allows a 5-year-old to get hold of a loaded weapon and nothing can be done to him or the parents.”