Two Missouri teenage cousins have both lost their lives in an Instagram Livestream gone wrong at a birthday party in St. Louis on Friday.
Kuaron Harvey, 14, and his 12-year-old cousin Paris Harvey were live on Instagram around 2 a.m. Friday, when a gun Paris was playing with accidentally discharged and fatally struck Kuaron. Paris then pointed the gun at herself and pulled the trigger, ABC News reported.
Investigators initially called the fatal incident “a murder-suicide,” however, the victims’ families said it was not so.
“It was no murder. It wasn’t a suicide,” Paris’ distraught mother, Shinise Harvey, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “It was a freak accident. It happened.”
The devastated mom told the outlet that relatives who saw the video said the pair were “trying to be too hip” when the shooting occurred. First responders discovered the cousins unresponsive at 2:07 am and the two were declared dead at the scene.
“It wasn’t a situation where they were arguing or anything like that,” said Susan Dyson, the dead girl’s grandmother. “They were playing with a gun when they shouldn’t have been. Of course, they shouldn’t have been doing it.”
“I think it just went off,” Dyson said. “It went off by mistake.”
According to the grandma, Kuaron and Paris attend a relative’s birthday party when the two entered a bedroom to film in front of a mirror. That’s when the tragedy occurred.
Their family said the cousins were inseparable and were like “brother and sister” who would usually ride a horse together, pull pranks, sing or make videos for social media.
“No matter how good we raise our kids they still are going to venture off,” Shinise Harvey told the Dispatch.
St. Louis police are yet to release the results of their investigation into the deadly incident.
