When the police arrived, the shooting range instructor who was accidentally killed by a 9-year-old girl with an Uzi last week was still breathing, lying on the ground and moaning as a colleague tried to stanch the bleeding from a bullet wound to his head, according to a police report released Tuesday.
Her parents did not immediately realize what had happened after the automatic machine gun recoiled in the girl’s hands, shooting wildly on the morning of Aug. 25. The couple, visiting a recreational shooting range on a family vacation, then rushed over to comfort their daughter as she complained that “the gun was too much for her and it hurt her shoulder,” according to new details of the shooting released by the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office.
Only after another instructor rushed to the victim, Charles Vacca, did the parents realize that he had been shot in the head, according to the report, which was based on statements by the parents and witnesses. At that point, the parents took the girl and her siblings – a brother and a sister – away from the scene, heading to a cafeteria upstairs, the father told deputies.
Vacca, 39, was airlifted to a hospital in Las Vegas, where he would die later that night. He was the range master at the shooting range, the Last Stop resort, in White Hills, Arizona.
The father, in his initial statement to a deputy sheriff, according to the report, said that his family had caught a shuttle from their hotel in Las Vegas to the Last Stop, which is also known as Bullets and Burgers, across the border in Arizona, at approximately 9:45 a.m. He said they took a ride on a monster truck before arriving at the shooting range.
The father was the first to shoot, followed by his 9-year-old daughter, by his account. The mother, who was recording video of the girl on a cellphone, told the deputies that she watched as the gun recoiled and her daughter dropped it to the ground.
The police report includes the names of the parents, but the girl’s name is blacked out. The New York Times is not publishing the parents’ names.
The father “stated his family is in shock and just wants to leave the area and go back to Las Vegas,” one of the deputies said in the police report. The deputy said he had asked to speak to the daughters, but the father said “he would prefer if no one talked to his children as they are going through a lot.”
