This is truly a heart-wrenching and a tear-jerker story of an established Broadway star with a ticket to Hollywood.
During his audition, American Idol contestant John Arthur Greene revealed that he accidentally shot his 12-year-old brother Kevin dead when he was just 8, and how music helped him deal with the overwhelming grief in the past 19 years.
“My brother and I were completely inseparable when we were growing up. It was me and him. We would always play cops and robbers and army and things like that. We were playing one night, on my parents’ wedding anniversary, and I was hiding – it was my chance to hide.
“We were playing cops and robbers and growing up on the farm we always handled the guns in the house and we were always extremely safe. Nothing was ever loaded. It just so happened that night one of them was loaded and I picked up a gun and I called him into the room and it went off. I held my brother and watched him die.”
After Kevin passed away, the now-27-year-old channeled his guilt and grief into music to keep his brother’s memory alive, calling it his survival mechanism.
“Right now I lift him up every day and he holds me up. Music is how I coped with everything.”
#ImportantIssues #fridayreads On average, nine children under age 18 are unintentionally shot in the US every day. https://t.co/PcVpRvhNaC
— Jamie Averbeck (@JamieAverbeck) April 29, 2016
More people are accidentally shot by their children in USA than are murdered in UK,France & Germany combined
Oh the high price of Freedom…— Adrian Mourby (@AdrianMourby) April 28, 2016
Accidental gun deaths involving children are a major problem in America. The country has one of the highest reported rates of unintentional child gun deaths in the world. In 2013, The New York Times reported:
“Children shot accidentally – usually by other children – are collateral casualties of the accessibility of guns in America, their deaths all the more devastating for being eminently preventable. They die in the households of police officers and drug dealers, in broken homes and close-knit families, on rural farms and in city apartments.
“Some adults whose guns were used had tried to store them safely; others were grossly negligent. Still others pulled the trigger themselves, accidentally fracturing their own families while cleaning a pistol or hunting… And there are far more of these innocent victims than official records show.”
In 2015, about 265 children under the age of 18 picked up a firearm and shot someone by accident; 83 of those shootings were fatal. Here’s how many accidental shootings happened at the hands of children in 2015 alone, by age:
In 2016, toddlers have shot more people in the US than Muslim terrorists have:
This article (American Idol Singer Shot His Brother Dead While Playing ‘Cops And Robbers’) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com.
