Two kids in fatal gunfire incidents in America on Thanksgiving

WASHINGTON • A five-year-old child was shot and killed in Minnesota by a teen who was filming a social media video with friends on Thanksgiving Day last Thursday.

Another five-year-old also died in a separate gun incident near Atlanta, while a man in a Philadelphia suburb died when struck by a stray bullet during Thanksgiving dinner.

In the Minnesota incident, the five-year-old boy was in a house where several teens were making a video, police said. When a 13-year-old fired a gun, the young child was struck and killed.

Police in the Brooklyn Park suburb said their initial probe found the shooting to be accidental, but they added that the 13-year-old had been arrested and was being held at a juvenile detention centre.

Neither the victim nor the teen was identified.

In the separate incident in the Atlanta suburb of South Fulton, family members told ABC affiliate WSB-TV that the victim, identified as five-year-old Khalis Eberhart, hit a gun sitting on a chair and it went off. She died in hospital.

In the third incident, police said Mr Edilberto Pelaez Moctezuma, 25, was having Thanksgiving dinner with his family when a stray bullet struck him, according to NBC. Kevon Clarke, 19, has been charged with murder. Police said he was in a dispute after he and his girlfriend were asked to leave a nearby house.

The deaths were among at least 36 by gunfire on Thanksgiving Day, according to the Gun Violence Archive website.

In the first five months of this year, 54 people in the United States have died in gun violence daily, according to a Washington Post analysis - up from an average of 40 a day during the corresponding period of the previous six years.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE