Two children have been killed after what police are describing as murder suicide, which happened while the pair were playing with a gun at a birthday party.
Kuaron Harvey, 14, and Paris Harvey, 12, both St. Louis locals, had gone live on Instagram around 2 a.m. on Friday when the tragic accident occurred, CBS News reports.
The younger child had been playing with a gun, which went off and killed her cousin.
This then prompted her to shoot herself.
While police initially described the deadly incident as a murder-suicide, their family said this wasn’t the case.
Paris’ distraught mother, Shinise Harvey, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch it was a “freak accident”.
“It was no murder. It wasn’t a suicide,” she said,
Relatives who witnessed the girls together before the double shooting said the pair had been “trying to be too hip” when the shooting happened, she claimed.
Police told the local outlet that the cousins were found unresponsive at 2.07am.
They were both later pronounced dead at the scene, officers said.
Susan Dyson, the dead girl’s grandmother, said: “It wasn’t a situation where they were arguing or anything like that.”
“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.”
The pair had been at a birthday party for younger family members when they went into the bathroom, to film in front of a mirror.
The family described the pair as being very close, like “brother and sister”.
They typically horsed around when together, pulling pranks, rapping or making videos, she said,
“No matter how good we raise our kids, they still are going to venture off,” Shinise Harvey, Paris’ mother, told the Dispatch.
The results of St. Louis police’s investigation has not yet been released.
