Sean Smith was just 10 years old when he fatally shot his younger sister, Erin, at their family home just north of Miami in Florida.
“I remember taking the gun out,” the now-36-year-old Smith told StoryCorps in a sit-down interview.
“My sister was off to the side of the room. I distinctly remember her saying, ‘You should put it back’ — and she ran across [the room] as my finger hit the trigger.
“It went off and, in a flash, she was down.”
On June 5, 1989, Sean was rummaging around for a computer game his mother had hidden from him in their bedroom.
During the search, Sean came across his father’s .38 revolver stashed in an underwear drawer.
Home alone with his sister, Sean will forever live with the memory of her body falling to the ground, after a single bullet penetrated her shoulder and hit her heart.
As his little sister fell to the floor, Sean dropped the gun and ran to her aid. Trying to stop the blood, he planted his hand over her wound and dialed 911.
“My sister’s dead,” Sean said in a recording of the emergency call.
“I didn’t know my dad’s, my dad’s gun was loaded. And I shot her, I didn’t mean to.”
As police and paramedics arrived at the home and attempted to revive Erin, Sean was escorted into another room, away from the bloodied scene.
“I was just trying to wrap my 10-year-old mind around what had happened — that, you know, in an instant, my sister wasn’t there anymore,” Smith said.
This week, in a rare interview alongside her son, Lee Smith remembered the “blur” that happened almost 27 years ago, a day when no one was to blame, but everyone felt guilty.
“It was just a blur, to be honest with you,” Lee Smith said in the interview.
“You know, when something happens — like when a crime happens — you’re mad at this person. But we had nobody to get mad at, because how can you get mad at a 10-year-old little boy?”
Lee Smith said the pain of losing her daughter never goes away.
“I have the hardest time when people ask me how many children I have. They go, ‘Oh, what’s their ages?’ And I say, ‘41, 36 and eternally 8,’” she said.
But it’s the pain inflicted on her son, who somewhat buried the incident when he was younger, that has since surfaced with age.
“When you were younger, it seemed to me that you just pushed it aside. But as you got older, it seemed to come more to the surface,” Lee Smith said.
Sean admitted he had difficulty talking about his feelings and emotions, especially when it came to conversations with his parents.
“Any little mention or memory of Erin would break me down, and, you know, I’d be a crying mess,” Smith said.
“We were only a year apart, and we definitely had that sibling love.
“I just remember him [Dad] saying, ‘It’s not your fault,’ but I couldn’t help but blame myself at that point, you know, I didn’t even think of how he might’ve felt some guilt as well,” he added.
How Erin’s death sparked a change in firearm possession
The Smith family underwent extreme scrutiny when Erin was shot dead by her brother, Sean. Her fatality was the first in a wave of accidental child shootings around the state, which reignited an emotional debate about gun control and firearm storage.
In 1987, two years before Erin’s death, 9-year-old David Berger was killed by his friend in Florida.
The boy who shot David had found a loaded rifle inside the home and decided to play with it. Tragically, David was at the other end of the barrel when the trigger was pulled.
Parents Bill and Susan Berger were heartbroken, and later enraged. Why was there no consequence to the parents for allowing a firearm to be so easily accessible to a child?
In an interview with The Trace, Berger and her husband said they helped write a law, which received support from then-Congressman Harry Jennings. This law would see adults criminally liable when children were involved in these types of shootings.
Fast-forward to the month of Erin’s death: Florida saw four other accidental shootings across the state. Each shooting occurred because another child simply had easy access to an adult’s firearm. Three of those shootings were fatal, while the fourth left a 3-year-old paralyzed.
With more than 30 percent of Americans owning a firearm, children in the United States are nine times more likely to be killed by a gun than children in other developed nations are.
Estimates suggest that more than 100 children die in an accidental shooting each year in America, and more than 3,000 are shot unintentionally. According to federal data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 70 percent of those shootings would have been prevented if the firearm were secured properly.
The week of Erin’s death sent the press into a frenzy, and the state legislature sat for a special session to discuss the law originally suggested by the Bergers.
The law, which would make it illegal for an adult to leave a gun unstored and unsecured where a child could find it, was enacted as the Child Access Prevention (CAP) law in 1989, with Florida being the first state in America to implement it.
Since adapting the law almost 27 years ago, more than half the states have some type of CAP law on their books.
Under Florida’s law, if a gun owner fails to secure a firearm in a locked box or with a trigger lock and a child accesses the gun, the owner can be charged with a misdemeanor if the child exhibits the gun in public or uses it in a threatening manner. If a child causes injury or death, a negligent gun owner can be charged with a felony.
It has taken Sean his whole life not to break down at the thought of his little sister’s death. Dropping out of high school and plunging into drug abuse, it wasn’t until Sean had a child of his own that he was able to save himself.
“My son [Dylan] pretty much saved my life,” Sean said.
Lee Smith, who is now 63 years old, said that if she could speak with Erin again, she would tell her that Sean is OK now.
“I’m worried that this is going to haunt you forever,” she said of her son.
Sean added: “I would want to tell her I’m sorry.”
“I regret every single thing that happened that day. And I wish one day that I’ll be good.
“And it’d be nice to finally say that and, you know, mean it.”