BriOnna Givens had put in a long, painful day on her feet as a nurse’s aide.
It was the height of the COVID pandemic, October 2020, and fear of the delta variant was rampant at the nursing home and other facilities where Givens worked as an agency nurse.
She was in constant pain from sciatica in her back, which ached so much that she had stopped at an urgent care clinic on her way home and was prescribed a muscle relaxant.
The job wasn’t her only stress.
In an incident a few months earlier, a man had put a gun to Givens’ head, threatening to kill her. No one had been charged, so Givens, 31, decided to get a gun to protect her three young children and herself.
It all left her exhausted and worried.
At night, Givens would lie awake as her children slept, listening for any noise in their small apartment on the north side of Milwaukee, her loaded gun tucked between her mattress and box spring.
Now, this day finally over, she laid in bed, snuggling with her youngest, 2-year-old Destin. Givens usually made sure her kids were asleep before she went to bed, but this night she drifted off first.
A loud bang jolted her awake.
Givens smelled smoke from the gun and then she saw Destin standing next to the bed, blood gushing from his hand.
The boy would recover — but the family nearly fell apart.
System responds when terrible things happen to kids
Deep inside Milwaukee County’s Criminal Justice Facility, Deputy District Attorney Matthew Torbenson sits behind a desk surrounded by pictures of family, house plants and a pile of court documents, each telling a sad story involving a child.
A product of the Sherman Park neighborhood and a graduate of Rufus King High School, Torbenson said he cares deeply about the Milwaukee community. He was drawn to advocating for the county’s most vulnerable victims as a Marquette University law student interning in the district attorney’s office.
Now, at 46, he leads a team of prosecutors. Torbenson, whose boyish looks belie his experience, speaks in a calm but direct way, whip-smart on the law with an almost photographic memory of the victims he has represented and the people he has prosecuted.
Torbenson has been doing this kind of work for two decades, prosecuting cases involving harm to children — physical abuse, neglect, sexual assault.
Sometimes a parent has beaten a child mercilessly. Other times a child has died after getting into deadly drugs like fentanyl that were left out.
Then there are the cases where a parent or other caregiver fails to lock up a firearm and a child gets a hold of it.
The horrific results of those actions — and failures to act — all come across Torbenson’s desk.
And all leave an impression, which in turn drives how he and his team tackle these cases.
“I have seen every single autopsy photograph taken of a child that’s been shot,” he said. “It is devastating to the bodies of these children. And if it does not lead to their death, it often is life-altering for them. They’re innocent, they’re completely and wholly innocent.
“We have a responsibility to protect them.”
Children are shot with guns. Do something. But what?
Accidental shootings that kill children are rare, accounting for 5% of all gun deaths for those younger than 18. But they are crushingly tragic and highly preventable.
In each case, a mistake was made, one that could and should have been avoided. These shootings are not, in a sense, complicated to prevent, at least when compared to suicides, homicides and police-involved shootings. That’s because, by definition, they lack intentionality.
Preventing such shootings doesn’t require an understanding of what led up to them as would be the case in the murder of a battered woman by her husband, a suicide by a middle-aged man or a police shooting of someone showing threatening behavior.
Unintentional shootings boil down to the instrument: the gun.
Prevent access, prevent the shooting.
And yet that is proving difficult, vexing officials in public health and criminal justice amid an array of emotional, complicated questions:
Should the parent who didn’t lock up the gun be charged? Or is it “punishment enough” for a mother or father to have contributed to their own child’s injury or death? Do so-called “child access prevention” laws, which are increasingly popular, prevent such incidents? Is the fear of prison more likely to motivate safer behavior than fear for a child’s safety?
Wherever you land on these questions, one thing is clear:
In Wisconsin, cases are handled differently depending on where the shooting happened, a first-of-its-kind review and analysis by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, part of the USA TODAY Network, found.
In Milwaukee County, the starting point is almost always a felony charge.
And BriOnna Givens lives in Milwaukee County.
Prosecutor sees felony behavior in guns left around children
Wisconsin has a law, passed in 1991, that says when children get their hands on guns and are hurt or killed, the charge is a misdemeanor, which typically means probation.
Torbenson has a different approach.
For the past eight years in Milwaukee County — where accidental shootings involving children happen most often in the state — the district attorney’s office has almost exclusively issued felony charges under a different statute, the Journal Sentinel found.
The difference in charging can be seismic for defendants.
A felony conviction is more likely to lead to time behind bars. And even if the case ends in probation, such a conviction or even just a felony charge can reverberate through a person’s life: They can have children taken by the state, lose a job or be evicted from their apartment.
If anything, the problem has become more urgent.
During the pandemic, with more people at home all day, accidental shootings jumped — and the share of children getting hurt or killed rose even faster, in Milwaukee and across the nation, according to federal data and the Journal Sentinel analysis.
Torbenson said a key reason why the cases are charged this way in Milwaukee is simple: A felony conviction bars someone from owning a gun.
“We recognize that everyone under the law has a constitutional right to bear arms,” he said, “but with that tremendous right comes the tremendous responsibility of doing it in a way that is safe, so that other individuals aren’t going to be harmed or killed.”
‘We did everything right’
Givens first decided she needed a gun years before her son shot himself in the hand.
It was about eight years ago and she and her children were living near North 27th and West Hadley streets.
One day on the street in front of their apartment, a man in a rage ran up to their car and started yelling and banging on the driver’s side window. Givens screamed at him but the man would not stop. She sped away.
The encounter rattled her, and also gave her a new resolve.
“This is real life, OK?” Givens said years later, her voice tense after recounting what happened. “I realized my voice was not going to defend us.”
She and her mother, who lived across the street, both bought guns. They took a safety class, then a second, and applied for and received concealed carry permits. They bought safes to store their guns and ensure Givens’ children couldn’t get them.
“We did everything right, everything we were supposed to,” Corey Conrad, Givens’ mother, told the Journal Sentinel.
As a single mom, Givens was ready to defend her children, but she has always been a softie when it comes to disciplining them. She never “whoops” them, preferring loving correction instead.
“I believe in soft parenting,” Givens said.
Besides her kids, Givens’ other purpose in life is nursing. In 2018, she enrolled at Milwaukee Area Technical College to realize her dream of becoming a registered nurse.
“I love helping people who can’t help themselves,” she said. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”
‘I just feared if anyone ever came in our house’
In time, Givens’ gun was stolen. An incident in May 2020, what was supposed to be a quick run to the grocery store, convinced her she needed one again.
A cousin picked her up one evening. As they were driving, he said he needed to make a stop to get his cellphone.
But when they pulled onto West Burleigh Street, her cousin stepped from the car and drew his pistol. He had spotted someone who, Givens later learned, had made what he considered a disrespectful comment. Men ran off a porch, firing their own guns, as Givens described it to police and in an interview with the Journal Sentinel.
Givens jumped out of the car, ran and tried to hide.
A man found her crouching between two parked cars. He put a gun to her head.
“Were you in that car with him?” the man screamed. “I’ll blow your head off!”
She swore she wasn’t. He grabbed her and pushed her into the backseat of another car. The driver gunned it.
Givens opened the door and jumped out, rolling onto the street, badly scraping her arms, legs and stomach. Bleeding, she scrambled to her feet and limped to a house where two older women let her in and called police.
From her hospital bed, Givens told detectives what happened and said she even found the suspects on social media. But her identification was not good enough. A letter from the district attorney soon arrived: No charges would be filed.
The gun Givens bought years earlier with her mom had been stolen, so now she bought another one. She started carrying her gun everywhere and sleeping with it under her mattress. She no longer had the safe for the gun, but she doubts at that point she would have used it anyway.
“I just feared if someone ever came into our house, no one’s gonna be like, ‘Oh, let me not shoot you. Let me give you time to get your gun out of your safe,’” she said. “So I kept it close.”
How to charge accidental shootings dates to 1990s
In 1991, Wisconsin joined a growing number of states passing child access prevention laws, designed to hold adults who let children get guns accountable.
The bill had bipartisan support, coming from a task force on accidental injuries and deaths of children, led by then-Lt. Gov. Scott McCallum, a Republican.
State Sen. John Plewa (D-South Milwaukee), co-authored the bill. Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson signed it.
The law applied to children younger than 14 who were injured or killed. To be charged, the gun had to be loaded and unlocked. The punishment was a misdemeanor.
“This was not geared at double punishing parents,” McCallum told the Journal Sentinel in a recent interview. “There’s enough grief if that happens.”
Lawmakers added two special provisions: A prosecutor may consider the parents’ grief when deciding whether to charge them and police are required to wait seven days before arresting a parent.
Those provisions are rare, but not unique among the more than two dozen states with such laws, experts say.
Wisconsin’s seven-day arrest grace period is not being followed, at least not in the city of Milwaukee, the Journal Sentinel found in reviewing records and interviewing defendants.
A Milwaukee police spokesman said that’s because defendants are typically arrested on more than one charge related to the shooting, including ones that don’t have that provision, so immediate arrest is allowed.
McCallum said lawmakers were trying to address a growing problem while striking a balance. He and lawmakers could not envision situations — loaded guns being more often left within reach of children — that prosecutors in Milwaukee and elsewhere are encountering today, 33 years later.
“We had an issue then that seemed we could address, working together. And in fact, that’s what we did,” he said.
Prosecution looks different in counties outside Milwaukee
Accidental shootings of children happen elsewhere in Wisconsin, of course, but less often.
In 2022, for example, a Green Bay man was charged after the 5-year-old daughter of his girlfriend was fatally shot by another child. Jordan Leavy-Carter, 35, a felon, left his loaded gun on a TV table where the child got it, according to a complaint. He is charged with a felony and awaiting trial.
In many other cases outside Milwaukee County, however, the charge is a misdemeanor under the 1991 law.
Last year, a father in Winnebago County left his loaded gun on a table outside the bathroom. His 5-year-old fired the gun, leaving a burn mark on his face, according to the complaint. The father received a deferred prosecution, which could wipe it from his record.
Even more severe cases have received a misdemeanor charge.
In 2011 for instance, a Green Bay man left his son and daughter home alone while he worked. He showed them where he kept his gun “in case of an emergency,” according to a criminal complaint.
Hearing the dog bark, the 11-year-old boy got his father’s gun and accidentally shot his sister, 9, in the chest. The children didn’t call for help, worried their father would get in trouble. The boy cleaned his sister’s wound. As she was falling asleep, he worried she was dying and “prayed to God to make him die instead,” the complaint said.
The girl woke up the next day and told her brother she was fine. She took a shower to clean off the blood and went to school. In class, she had trouble opening her desk. It was then that her teacher saw she was bleeding.
The girl was taken to a hospital and survived — the bullet had entered below her chin, went through her chest and exited near her armpit. It hit her collarbone but missed vital organs.
The father, who initially lied to police about the gun, received a year of probation.
In other cases, incidents resulted in no charges.
In 2017, the 3-year-old son of the police chief in Elroy got his father’s service gun and shot himself. The boy survived and no charges were filed.
In Antigo a couple of years earlier, a 4-year-old boy shot himself in the head with his father’s gun. The boy survived. Again, no charges were filed.
Charges are especially rare when children are hurt or killed during hunting season, according to state Department of Natural Resources records and a search of media accounts by the Journal Sentinel.
In the past 15 years, roughly 50 children have been shot accidentally while hunting in Wisconsin, according to a Journal Sentinel analysis of incidents. Four have died. No charges were filed.
Public health experts say the disparity in the way incidents are handled is concerning.
“It seems like the responses really vary based on the person and the place where the event occurs,” said Dr. James Bigham, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health who teaches medical students about how to talk to patients about firearms injury prevention.
“It doesn’t necessarily seem like we have a uniform or universal application of the law.”
Approach to accidental shootings shifts in Milwaukee
For years after the 1991 bill’s passage, cases in Milwaukee were typically charged as misdemeanors, the Journal Sentinel review found.
For instance, in 2010, a 2-year-old boy fatally shot himself with a gun his mother had left in a dresser drawer, forgetting to put it in her lockbox. She pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and received a year of probation.
Torbenson didn’t handle that case, but that same year he had one in which a 10-year-old boy shot himself with a loaded gun he found under his grandmother’s bed. The boy survived.
Torbenson charged the grandmother with a misdemeanor. She pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay a $100 fine.
In time, Torbenson came to believe charging a misdemeanor where there was the death of a child or an injury that easily could have become one was, in his words, “woefully inadequate.”
“How does that protect that family? How does that protect the greater community? How does that get the message out that storing a firearm responsibly is, in fact, a serious thing for our community? I don’t think it does,” he said. “That’s why I take the approach I do.”
As accidental shootings increased in Milwaukee, Torbenson began to help rewrite a different law, one focused on what is known as “felony neglect.” The law at the time said the neglect needed to be intentional. Torbenson said that didn’t make sense.
“It almost seemed contradictory — conduct being intentionally neglectful,” he said.
He pushed for a simple but important change, making it clear the neglect could be unintentional.
That law, passed in 2017, makes it possible to issue charges in cases such as a child living in a filthy house or one in dangerous disrepair, malnourishment of a child, failing to get necessary medical care or leaving dangerous drugs where children can get them.
The law doesn’t speak directly to a gun being left where a child can get it. However, in Milwaukee County, prosecutors almost exclusively use that law in accidental child shooting cases.
The results have been stark.
Before the neglect law was revised, there were 13 prosecutions following accidental shootings of children in Milwaukee, the Journal Sentinel analysis found. Nine were charged as misdemeanors and four as felonies.
Since the law’s passage, there have been 54 prosecutions. Two were charged as misdemeanors; 52 as felonies.
In other counties in Wisconsin during that same period, there were 34 prosecutions of unintended child shootings; 24 were charged as misdemeanors.
Torbenson said he can’t speak to what is happening in other counties, but he is not surprised by Milwaukee’s numbers. As prosecutions increased, he said he rarely sees parents who are remorseful or apologetic.
“It’s much more, ‘Why am I being arrested? What did I do wrong? I’m the one who lost a child,’” he said. “There is a lack of self-reflection about why we are here: This was preventable and preventable by you.”
Startled awake, mom discovers her son is shot
As Givens snapped awake, her son Destin was screaming, his right hand bleeding. Givens’ .22-caliber Glock handgun lay on the floor nearby.
Givens frantically dialed 911, then rushed her 2-year-old to the kitchen sink and thrust his hand under the water. The bullet had sliced through the webbing next to his thumb. There was a lot of blood.
Givens said she should have known what to do. She was a nurse who once worked at Froedtert Hospital, which specializes in shooting cases. But she couldn’t think clearly.
“I’m freaking out because my baby just shot himself,” she said recently. “I went into panic mode.”
Minutes later, the police and paramedics were crowded in the family’s apartment.
It had already been a bad year for these kinds of cases. Because of COVID, people were spending more time at home, domestic violence cases were climbing and gun sales were soaring because of unrest after police brutality cases, fears around COVID and more.
By the time 2020 was over, there would be 16 accidental shootings involving children in Milwaukee, two of them fatal, according to the Journal Sentinel review. That was double the previous year’s total incidents. Givens’ case was the 10th such shooting of the year.
In the chaos, Givens’ mom appeared and comforted Givens’ other children, 8-year-old Journey and 6-year-old Marcus.
Through sobbing tears, according to the police report, Destin told the officers, “I did it. I shot.”
Officers ordered Givens to quiet Destin so they could get answers from her: How did the boy get the gun? Where was she? Why did you leave a loaded gun under a mattress?
Givens stammered out answers. The officers had heard enough. They put Givens in handcuffs and led her to a squad car, even as paramedics continued to treat her son.
Unintended shootings drop, but children more often the victims
Unintentional shootings are the smallest category of gun deaths, making up about 1% of the total, and have been dropping for four decades.
There were about 2,000 unintentional gun deaths a year in 1979. Today, there are about 500 annually, with roughly 115 of them children, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
In keeping with national trends, accidental shootings in Milwaukee spiked during the pandemic and appear to be dropping in the past year.
Even as such shooting deaths have fallen over the years, there are troubling trends: Children ages 1 to 4 are more likely to be victims, the data shows, and those toddlers are more often Black children.
Laws that hold parents and others liable when children get hurt or killed in shootings are passing across the country. Wisconsin’s 1991 law and the felony neglect law, amended with Torbenson’s help, fall into that category.
Are such laws effective?
Studies have found evidence that these laws prevent unintentional shootings of children. The results have been touted by groups such as Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for tightening gun laws.
“We know these laws save lives,” said Alison Shih, senior counsel for Everytown.
A 2022 study, however, raises questions about that.
Matthew Miller, a doctor and professor at Northeastern and Harvard universities, said the intent behind the laws is solid: Children are safer when they cannot get to guns.
But when Miller, the study’s lead author, and his colleagues examined the data, they didn’t find the preventative effect that had been reported.
Miller told the Journal Sentinel his team found many gun owners didn’t know the laws even existed in their state. Some did know but were still keeping their guns unlocked, he added.
“I’m all for getting parents to lock up their guns and make them inaccessible to their children. That can only save lives,” Miller said. “I just don’t have much confidence that as enacted these laws are getting many parents to lock up their guns.”
No budging when it came to charges
Givens was led to a jail cell late the night her son shot himself. Then, it seemed, police forgot about her, she said.
After a couple hours, officers came back and gave her some water, questioned her, and then took her to the county jail for booking. She said she spent several days behind bars with no one telling her how her son was doing.
With no criminal record, Givens hoped for a misdemeanor or a deferred prosecution, where if she followed court orders for a year, the case would disappear.
The prosecutor, part of Torbenson’s team, refused.
“It was felony, felony, felony,” Givens said.
Miss why someone has a gun, misunderstand how to help
Standing before a class of a dozen new gun owners in summer 2023, firearms instructor Jieire Vance ticked through slides.
“The Wisconsin Department of Justice recommends that you keep your firearm unloaded and locked in a safe, separated from the ammunition,” Vance said.
There was silence for a second in the basement of Prince Hall Masonic Temple on the city’s near north side. Then several students in the class started laughing.
“Well, that’s not why I am here!” one older woman blurted out.
Firearms instructors like Vance hear every day about why people get guns and how they store them. People are buying guns to keep their homes safe, Vance said, so it is crucial for owners to ensure that children are not put in jeopardy. It also is important to understand that every situation is different, he said.
“I keep it very frank,” Vance said of when he talks to parents about small children getting guns. “I want them to hear the severity of it.”
Depending on maturity, older children may be part of the home defense plan, Vance said. He and his partner offer to come to their students’ homes for free to evaluate their safety and storage plans.
Jeff Pharris, a firearms instructor from Washington County, said how and where people keep their gun depends on their history and the risks they face.
When talking to clients of a domestic violence shelter, one woman told Pharris she slept with a loaded gun on her nightstand because a man had crept into her room and sexually assaulted her.
The woman told Pharris she couldn’t fall asleep without a loaded gun nearby.
Such stories are troubling to public health officials and researchers who note when there is a gun in a home, it is more likely a gun will be used to hurt or kill someone living there rather than to stop an intruder. That is backed by studies.
Yet other experts say that blanket message may miss the world where many people live, facing life in a high-crime neighborhood or worried about an abusive former partner.
A majority of defendants in unintentional shooting cases told police they had the gun for defense, according to criminal complaints reviewed by the Journal Sentinel.
Erin Earp, senior policy attorney at Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said oversimplifying the issue can alienate and even shame gun owners.
“We’re not trying to say anybody’s a bad parent,” she said. “Every time I’m sure that person is thinking, ‘I never thought my child would do this. I never thought this accident would happen.’ They do happen and there are things that can’t be undone.”
Vance said he has taught thousands of first-time gun owners in Milwaukee in recent years. Most of them are Black women — like Givens — who say they want to protect themselves and their children and don’t believe police will be there in time to help.
One woman told the Journal Sentinel she got a gun after she was punched in the face by a drug dealer who accused her of talking to police.
Another told the Journal Sentinel, “A man hit me harder than anyone has ever hit me. I said, ‘That’s never going to happen again.’ So I got a gun.”
What do the cases in Milwaukee look like?
Givens, who was charged with a felony several weeks after the shooting, is typical of the people charged in Milwaukee County in such cases, the Journal Sentinel review found.
Defendants are typically related to the victims, most often the mother or father. The majority of defendants have no criminal record. And nearly all are Black.
While the initial charge is most often a felony in Milwaukee County, most of the cases resulted in probation or a short jail term.
In counties outside Milwaukee, where prosecutors were more likely to charge defendants with misdemeanors, the Journal Sentinel review found that the majority of defendants are white.
To a certain extent, that disparity isn’t surprising. More than 65% of the state’s Black population lives in Milwaukee County.
Because Milwaukee County prosecutors are almost always charging felonies, they are reinforcing a disparity where Black parents are more likely to be charged with a harsher crime, based purely on where they live.
Regarding the racial composition of these cases, Torbenson noted that almost all of the victims are also Black.
“That’s a huge loss for this community,” he said. “That’s who I think about at the end of the day is those little kids.”
Torbenson said he and his team consider a person’s history and whether they accept responsibility when deciding how to resolve the case, including what charges to bring. In some cases, he noted, no charges are issued.
The Journal Sentinel found about two dozen accidental shootings in Milwaukee County where no charges were issued over 15 years.
Details about why no charges were filed were often not available. In cases where details were available, evidence was lacking about whose gun it was. Other factors like what effort was made to store the gun are considered in whether to charge, Torbenson said.
He added he typically has not charged cases where the victim is older and suicide was the likely motive.
Citing cases like Givens’ and others, experts said it is worth considering how laws and the approach in Milwaukee County could land on already hard-hit people.
“We want to make sure that we’re not destroying someone’s life in the meantime because the ultimate goal is to keep our kids safe,” said Jen Pauliukonis, director of policy and programming at Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
“We don’t want a law that’s going to tear down those who are already the most vulnerable to so many public health issues.”
Shootings of children range from careless to utterly reckless
In the end, Givens never encountered Torbenson — whose approach to accidental shootings determined so much of what has happened to her since. An assistant district attorney working for Torbenson prosecuted the case.
When talking with a reporter, Torbenson flipped through Givens’ case to get the basics.
Loaded gun under a mattress. Victim of an earlier crime. Took a muscle relaxant.
It all added up to how the case was charged — a felony — and the plea agreement that came later.
Sitting at his desk behind two 20-ounce cups of Starbucks coffee, one done and the other nearly so, Torbenson said the cases range from the careless to the utterly reckless.
The death of Elijo Gonzalez, a 5-year-old who shot himself in early 2023, falls into that second category.
The victim and his sister, 11, were being watched by their uncle, Bryan Jaensch, in a house on Milwaukee’s south side.
Elijo grabbed his father’s loaded gun and showed Jaensch he had it. Jaensch took the pistol away and put it on a shelf but it was in a spot where the boy could still get it.
The boy grabbed the gun again. His sister noticed and alerted her uncle. But rather than take away the gun, Jaensch simply yelled to put it down and turned back to his phone.
Seconds later the boy shot himself in the head.
The father got six years in prison; Jaensch, the uncle, got four years.
With her brother’s blood spattered on her clothes, the girl later told detectives she couldn’t understand why her uncle hadn’t taken the gun away and put it somewhere safe.
Recalling the case, Torbenson shakes his head: “This 11-year-old girl gets it.”
Life today for Givens is hard; she wishes a lot were different
Givens’ life fractured soon after her son shot himself.
She fought to keep custody of Destin. She lost her job as a nurse’s aide and couldn’t find another. For a time the family was homeless, her children staying with her mother while she lived in her car.
“I just didn’t know which way to turn,” Givens said.
Givens considered taking her case to trial, but it felt risky. If she lost, she could end up behind bars away from her kids, now ages 6, 10 and 12.
“I felt like my life was on the line,” she said. “What is going to happen with my career? What is going to happen to my babies?”
The prosecutor offered her a misdemeanor neglect charge. She agreed to plead guilty.
With no criminal record, Givens didn’t get time behind bars. Instead, she was sentenced to 14 months probation and required to take a parenting class and a gun safety course.
Because it was still a neglect charge, she said she has had difficulty finding a job in health care or education.
She has lost her dream of becoming a registered nurse. After two years of classes, Givens said she dropped out when she was told her conviction would stop her from finishing her degree.
“I just feel like so much was taken,” she said. “I’m trying to find me. I’m trying to find my purpose.”
Givens said she isn’t scared of her attackers coming for her like she was in 2020. She moved away from the neighborhood and the man who threatened to kill her has since died. She doesn’t have a gun but if she ever got one again, she said she would be sure to have — and use — a safe.
“Before you buy anything else, buy a gun safe,” she tells people today.
Meanwhile, Givens is in a new apartment with her children. She spends most of her time with them, hanging out at home, going to their basketball games and enjoying a new church they started attending.
She is waiting tables, back to a job she worked as a teenager, and has difficulty making the bills.
Givens said people look at her sideways these days because they see her conviction online. They may say: ‘You don’t even take care of your kids.’
“I tell them, ‘You don’t even know my story. You don’t know what happened,’” she said.
Givens said she needs to remain strong for her kids. But she gets sad when she remembers what happened to her, even as she watches him race around her living room.
And she feels like she will be paying the price for the rest of her life.
Journal Sentinel data reporter Eva Wen and former O’Brien Fellowship assistant Ben Schultz contributed to this report. Reporter John Diedrich can be reached at jdiedrich@gannett.com.
About this project
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter John Diedrich examined the full extent of gun deaths in Wisconsin during a O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University.
The project reveals the full picture of gun deaths in the state and tells the stories of people affected by gun deaths and those trying to find solutions.
Marquette University and administrators of the program played no role in the reporting, editing or presentation of this project.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: How Wisconsin law treats parents of children in accidental shootings