The screen shot above depicts the seconds before a nine-year girl accidentally shot her gun instructor dead on Monday. Recorded at the Bullets and Burgers shooting range in White Hills, Arizona, the edited 22-second clip plays up to the point where the girl loses control of an Uzi, striking 39-year-old Charles Vacca.
The shocking recording taken by the girl’s parents and released by police shows Vacca standing closely next to the girl when the gun recoiled as she fired on full automatic mode. As the clip unfolds, Vacca is seen to instruct the girl to hold the weapon with two hands at all times and to take a perpendicular stance to the target.
Then Vacca asks her to fire one shot for him, which she does. Then, Vacca tells the girl to adjust her stance and squeeze the trigger to let off a volley, but something goes wrong when she fires a second time. His last words to the girl are: ‘Alright, full auto.’
The girl loses her two-handed grip on the weapon and it pulls to her left, striking Vacca in the head. Charles Vacca, a father and veteran from Lake Havasu City, Arizona, was airlifted to hospital on Monday morning after the little girl shot him but died that evening.
Mohave County Sheriff Jim McCabe said the full video of the incident was ‘ghastly’.