Boy (13) shoots sister (15) with hunting rifle
At Lake Garda, a 13-year-old boy shoots his 15-year-old sister with a hunting rifle. The weapon belongs to the father, a recreational hunter.
Lake Garda is a popular holiday destination for many people in Italy. On Saturday afternoon (16 October), however, a tragic accident occurred on the western shore of the lake.
13-year-old pulls the trigger
Not the father, but his 13-year-old son shot and killed a 15-year-old girl with a hunting weapon in San Felice del Benaco in the province of Brescia towards evening.
This emerged from the interrogation of the father. Roberto Balzaretti, a 57-year-old former city councillor and forensic pathologist, initially took the blame himself. But then he recounted what had happened: father and son were showing the girl the rifle when the 13-year-old pulled the trigger and hit his sister in the chest. The 15-year-old girl died instantly.
Recreational hunter gave child access to weapons
The 13-year-old boy cannot be charged. The recreational hunter is being investigated for negligent storage of weapons and for having handed his son the hunting rifle as well as a further dozen firearms, from which the shot struck the girl in the chest and killed her instantly.
The intervention of emergency responders was in vain, and they could only confirm the girl's death. “This is without doubt an accident. A dramatic accident”, the investigators report.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier Poaching and hunting crime in Switzerland we document cases, legal questions and recurring patterns. What the research says about this is shown by Hunting fact-checked: the state of research.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
