Tragic story should serve as example
By THOM MARSHALL
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle
DOVIE HILL is dead.
She shot herself in the head with a gun she found at home.
It should not have happened. Guns should be locked in cabinets. They should have trigger locks. They shouldn't be loaded. Kids should not have access to them.
Dovie Hill was just 7 years old. She leaves a 2-year-old brother, a 5-year-old brother, a 9-year-old brother, and a 13-year-old sister. They all were at home when it happened. A houseful of kids with unsecured, loaded guns.
She leaves her mother, Terri Lynn Hill, 40, and her father, Glen Forrest Hill, 39, who has been a police officer for almost 20 years.
Cops know a great deal about guns. They live with guns. Guns are the main tools of their job. They have them in their cars and carry them strapped to their bodies. They use them as necessary to defend themselves and others or to gain control of violent or potentially violent situations.
Girl's father knew best
Dovie's father knows even more about guns than most police officers. He knows how it feels to be shot in the head.
It happened to him one Saturday years ago when he was off-duty, but still in uniform, and stopped to get a bite to eat at a Jack-in-the-Box on Telephone Road. He walked in on a robbery in progress. Two men, one with a knife and one with a pistol. The one with the revolver pointed it at Hill and fired.
The bullet grazed the back of Hill's head but didn't stop him from giving chase when the two men fled from the business. He followed them into an apartment complex where they managed to lose him. Then he was treated at Hermann Hospital and released.
That occurred in April 1990, back when Dovie's oldest sister was just a baby. Now 13, she was left in charge Monday night when mom was out and dad was working a second job.
It was 8:15 when Dovie pulled the trigger. She was taken by helicopter to the same hospital where her father had gone when he'd been shot. But her head wound proved fatal less than an hour after the shooting.
A police spokesman in Houston, where Officer Hill works, said Thursday that an Internal Affairs investigation is under way to determine whether Hill was responsible for the loaded and unsecured guns found in his house.
Police in Deer Park, where the Hill family lives, also are looking into the shooting. A sergeant there said he had no updates on that investigation.
Making a firearm accessible to a child is a Class A misdemeanor under Texas law "if the child discharges the firearm and causes death or serious bodily injury to himself or another person." Maximum penalty for a Class A misdemeanor is a year in jail and a $4,000 fine.
But is this a case that calls for punitive justice? What good could come from heaping more punishment atop the sorrow of losing a child?
Rather than asking only whether a law was broken and how can we punish the guilty person, could we instead apply restorative justice methods and ask: What was the harm done? What can be done to repair the harm? Who should repair the harm?
Outcome punishment enough
The harm done is that a gun was left unsecured and Dovie Hill is dead. Nothing can be done to bring Dovie back. But spreading word of this tragedy could help to increase compliance with the law, keep unsecured guns away from other children and thus save other lives.
According to my research, some 38 percent of all U.S. households report having at least one gun. One in five of those gun owners keeps them unlocked and loaded. Almost 12 times more children under age 15 died from guns in the United States than in 25 other industrialized countries.
Someone with the Children's Defense Fund noticed a few years ago that it was safer to be a working cop than a kid in the United States because more children under age 10 died from guns than law enforcement officers in the line of duty.
The person who is responsible for a tragedy that resulted from leaving loaded guns where children could get them could be most effective in warning others about what can happen.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/1758455
