The parents of a 4-year-old boy who shot himself with a loaded, unsecured handgun he found in their Alabama home have been arrested on charges related to the shooting and also to multiple snakes and a crocodile found in the home.
Blount County deputies were called to the hospital last Friday for the boy, who was brought in with critical gunshot wounds to his knee and arm.
“The mother was in the hospital with the child yelling at him making statements like ‘see, this is what happens when you play with guns,’” Blount County Sheriff Mark Moon told reporter sat a news conference this week.
The boy was brought to a Blount County hospital by private vehicle and then airlifted to Children’s of Alabama in Birmingham.
Police obtained a search warrant for the family’s Sugarland Lake community home and found what Moon called several “interesting pieces of evidence,” including drug paraphernalia, drugs, multiple unsecured firearms, about 30 snakes — six of them dead and covered in maggots — and a juvenile crocodile.
The snakes were in various aquariums in the home, the dead snakes together with the live ones, and the crocodile was in a tank in the bathroom. It’s illegal to have a crocodile in Alabama, and in fact most states. Fish and wildlife officials took custody of the animals, Moon said.
The boy’s parents, 39-year-old Cassandra Lynn Lutz and 26-year-old Andrew Corrie, were both charged with first degree assault for the shooting, AL.com reported. They also face multiple animal cruelty charges as well as chemical endangerment of children for the drugs and paraphernalia found in the home.
Moon said the child was in stable condition and expected to recover. He did not reveal the current location of the couple’s two children.
