Ingham County Prosecutor John Dewane announced a grand jury has indicted Avis Coward and two others in the case, including the boy’s mother.
“No two-year-old child should ever have access to a loaded firearm.”
Investigators say in October, Coward went inside a Lansing gas station, leaving a two-year-old child and the boy’s mother Emma Huver in the car.
Surveillance video shows a bullet hole appearing in the car window, then Huver getting out, holding her child with blood on his face from a gunshot wound.
Police say a gun also fell out of the car which Coward put back before smashing out the window with the bullet hole and driving off alone.
Police later found the car found burned and abandoned in a field, and the barrel of a pistol hidden in the wall of a Lansing home.
Now Coward and Huver face multiple felony firearm charges, and she also faces counts of child abuse.
Coward has additional charges of tampering with evidence along with another woman, Gina Schieberl, whom police say helped him.
Special Agent James Deir with the ATF calls the case “a cascade of poor decision making.”
“The choice to hide evidence and to destroy evidence, another bad choice. Accountability matters. That’s the message today.”
A larger message from the case: responsibility for properly storing weapons so they aren’t stolen or accidentally fired, especially around children.
Chief Medical Executive Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian says it’s a public safety issue with firearms now the leading cause of death for children in Michigan.
“Firearms are killing more children than motor vehicle accidents, drowning or even childhood cancer.”
