A man has been arrested on live TV in the US state of Indiana after his four-year-old son, appearing to wear a nappy, was seen waving a gun.
Shane Osborne, 45, was charged with neglect after neighbours reported a child in a hallway carrying what they believed to be a handgun, police said.
The arrest was filmed on the TV show On Patrol: Live.
The show aired surveillance video allegedly showing the boy playing with a weapon and even pulling the trigger.
Neighbour Nicole Summers told local station WTHR that she called police after the boy came to her door and pointed a pistol at her son.
“My son, he opened the door and then shut it and backed away and he was like, ‘Uh…baby with a gun. Get out of here, get out of here!'” said Mrs Summers.
Looking through the door’s peephole she confirmed that the gun was not a toy.
“He was just kind of holding it behind his back, and I thought…like that’s a real gun. I sell guns for a living, so I know what a gun looks like.”
Mr Osborne initially told police there were no weapons in the house, claiming to have been been feeling ill all day and sleeping, Beech Grove Police told the BBC.
“I don’t have a gun,” he tells police on the show, where Beech Grove officers are followed on shift. “I have never brought a gun into this house, if there is, it’s my cousin’s.”
He added that he did not realise that his son had been outside in the hallway of the apartments.
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While the officers were still on the scene, a neighbour came forward to the officers with surveillance video. The video showed the young child in the hallway with what appeared to be a real firearm.
Police then found the firearm in Mr Osborne’s apartment and he was arrested. It was later found that there were 15 bullets in the gun’s magazine, but luckily, there was no round in the chamber.
The search and arrest aired live on the TV programme On Patrol: Live, which is broadcast on the Reelz channel. Mr Osborne is due to appear in court on Thursday to face child negligence charges.
It comes in the same month that a six-year-old student allegedly shot his teacher with a handgun at a Virginia elementary school, in what police described as an “intentional” shooting.
SOURCE: BBCNEWS
