Father speaks out after child shoots self with gun

Gwinnett County police have charged a Snellville couple with child cruelty after their 4-year-old got a hold of a gun and grazed herself with a bullet.

The girl's father told Channel 2's Kerry Kavanaugh he didn't think the wound was very severe, so he never took the child to the doctor.

Police said two days had passed before a family friend called police.

Thursday Kavanaugh talked the father at his Snellville home and told her he had nothing to hide.

"She said she shot herself with the gun. Did you think she was making that up?" Kavanaugh asked.

"At first I didn't know what to believe at all," father Thomas Sumlin said.

Sumlin, 20, said he thought he could treat his 4-year old daughter's gunshot wound on his own.

Police said Sumlin, his girlfriend and their three children were temporarily staying at a Stone Mountain Days Inn off Highway 78, when the accidental shooting happened.

"She had found the gun under the bed and then she shot the gun and she got scared and dropped it," Sumlin said.

Sumlin said he wasn't there when the gun went off. But he said the bullet grazed his daughter's stomach, creating a gash.

He said he doesn't know where the gun came from. He blamed the hotel. Police have another theory.

"We also found in his home, a holster matching that gun, a magazine matching that gun as well as ammunition, and possibly the actual bullet that hit the little girl," Cpl. Jake Smith with the Gwinnett County Police Department said.

Police said when they searched the hotel room, they found a bullet hole in the sheet rock, but no bullet.

But the gun play isn't what landed Sumlin and the girl's mother, Tyshonna Blades, in jail.

"Cruelty to the second deals with negligence. And that's what this falls under -- letting her go without medical treatment for two days," Smith said.

The 4-year-old and her two siblings are now in state custody.

"This happened by accident and I didn't want any problems to come but it tued into something way different," Sumlin said.

Both parents are currently out of jail on bond.

During the investigation, police said they also arrested the child's grandmother, who tried to keep her son from police.