Viral News
3 Year Old Baton Rouge Boy Shot & Killed By A Stray Bullet While Sleeping In Bed During Gun Fight
3 Year Old Boy Shot Dead While Sleeping In Bed During Gun Fight In Baton Rouge
Days after a Baton Rouge mother moved with her three young children to a house on Fairfields Avenue, she was watching TV in her living room when a stray bullet crashed through a bedroom window, striking her toddler son in the head and killing him instantly.
“Just a little, innocent baby, and they shot him in the head,” said Cathy Toliver, the child’s grandmother.
A phone call jolted Toliver awake around 1:30 a.m. Wednesday. On the other end of the line was her daughter, Tye Toliver, with the unthinkable news: A burst of gunfire unleashed on several houses along their block had killed her son, Devin Page Jr. Police were swarming the scene.
View this post on Instagram
The 3-year-old boy started school earlier this week at a daycare in Baker. He was a “happy, happy, happy” boy and a “hip baby,” his grandmother said — a child who loved his mom so much he seemed incapable of separating from her.
The house where Devin and his family lived was not the intended target of the shooting, which happened around 11 p.m. Tuesday, Baton Rouge police said. But the stray bullet shattered the sleeping boy’s window, narrowly missing his year-old sister who lay beside him and leaving his family grief-stricken.
“This baby was just sleeping, peacefully,” Cathy Toliver said. “Now his mother is broken.”Page was the latest victim of what, to people who experience it, has come to feel like incessant — and sometimes random — gun violence in Baton Rouge.
His death prompted impassioned pleas from East Baton Rouge Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome, who, flanked by community activists, appeared at Wednesday’s Metro Council meeting to plead for an end to the violence — one of several such requests she’s made in recent months.
“Retaliation to keep or restore pride is not the answer,” she said. Activists and officials have pointed to bruised feelings and group feuds as reasons for some shootings in the two-year stretch.
You must be logged in to post a comment logged in Login