Boy dies while playing with gun
2012-12-06 09:03
Cape Town - A teenager playing with his friends accidentally shot and killed himself, not realising that the gun he thought was empty had a bullet hidden in the chamber.
Friends said Bruce Tobin, 15, held the gun to his head and said: “Ek gaan myself nou skiet [I’m going to shoot myself now],” reported the Daily Voice.
After the shot went off, Tobin swayed on his feet for a few seconds, trying to speak, before collapsing in the Wendy house in his grandmother’s backyard in Mitchell’s Plain, Cape Town.
The boy’s 17-year-old aunt said blood kept rushing out of his head and they could see bits of his brain.
“I watched Bruce take the bullets out of the gun and even the magazine was out. I was shocked when the shot went off,” Cecil van Wyk, 15, said. “We all ran out after he fell.”
But the boy’s grandmother, Martha Tobin, 62, was convinced that this version of events was not true and that her grandson had been shot.
She said the boy’s older brother was a gangster on the run from rivals and that one of the boys in the Wendy house was from a rival gang.
The heartbroken grandmother said the dead boy was “well-mannered” and enjoyed singing in church.
