A 6-year-old boy from Chicago fatally shot his 3-year-old brother in the head this weekend while playing a game of cops and robbers. The boy found his father's loaded gun and struck his younger brother in the head with it.
Michael Santiago, 25, father of the two boys was charged with one count of felony child endangerment causing death and was scheduled to appear in bond court Sunday but is still unclear if he made a plea. According to the police, Santiago told them that he used to be a gang member and had gotten the gun from another gang member for protection, Chicago Police Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi tells PEOPLE.
A family member carried the boy, Eian Santiago, to a nearby hospital. He was later transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 11:48PM. People waited outside the hospital to hear about the boy's condition.
According to a GoFundMe page set up to help the family with the funeral costs, the father, Santiago was looking after the 2 boys, while the children's mother was with her daughter to get milk. She hasn't been gone for a few minutes when the event happened. Lasalle is defending her husband, writing in a Facebook post Sunday, that what happened was accidental. She explained that her son found the gun and thought it was a toy. On her post, she made people understand that her family lived in a dangerous neighborhood and her husband was just doing what any other husband would do to protect his family. She finished her post by calling her husband "a great man and father."
Chicago police are also devastated about what happened, especially because the victim was a very young kid that was killed for something that could have been easily prevented, Guglielmi says.
