Father and son arrested after 10-year-old shoots another boy with stolen gun, police say

A 53-year-old man and his 10-year-old son were arrested Saturday in Sacramento County after the boy fatally shot another child using a stolen gun he had found in his father’s car, law enforcement officials said.

Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies responded to a report of a shooting in the 4700 block of Greenholm Drive in Foothill Farms, an unincorporated community about 20 minutes outside downtown Sacramento, just after 4:30 p.m. Saturday.

Deputies found a 10-year-old boy who was unresponsive lying in the middle of a parking lot bleeding from his head and neck. The boy, whom police did not publicly identify, later died at a hospital, according to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.

Witnesses identified those involved in the shooting and directed deputies to a nearby apartment, where they found Arkete Davis and two children, one of whom was his son.

Authorities said the boy, whom they did not identify by name, had grabbed the gun from his dad’s car while he was retrieving his father’s cigarettes from the vehicle. The boy had “bragged that his father had a gun” before he shot the other child, the sheriff’s office wrote in a news release. It is not clear whether the two children knew each other.

Detectives found a firearm that had been reported stolen in 2017 in a nearby trash can where authorities allege Davis attempted to dispose of it. The boy was arrested on suspicion of murder and taken to the Sacramento County Youth Detention Facility, authorities said.

Davis was arrested on suspicion of carrying a stolen loaded firearm in a vehicle, endangering the life of a child, illegally possessing a firearm as a felon, accessory after the fact and criminal storage of a firearm, all felonies, according to law enforcement and jail records. He is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail and is expected to appear in court Wednesday, according to jail records.