A 21-year-old Columbus man has been sentenced to 10 to 11½ years in prison after a gun he was cleaning discharged and killed his 16-year-old girlfriend in the city's Hilltop neighborhood. Franklin County Common Pleas Judge David Young handed down the sentence to Javoni Felix on October 14, more than two years after Carlie Frizzell died from a gunshot wound in October 2024.
Felix pleaded guilty on September 14 to reckless homicide and endangering children in connection with Frizzell's death, according to The Columbus Dispatch. The outlet reports that Frizzell died after a gun fired while Felix was cleaning it, a detail Frizzell's family also confirmed, saying her boyfriend's gun went off during the cleaning process.
The shooting unfolded on the night of October 2, 2024, when Columbus police responded to a reported shooting in the 500 block of South Eureka Avenue in the Hilltop just after 10:30 p.m., per NBC4. Officers found Frizzell suffering from a gunshot wound and rushed her to a nearby hospital in critical condition. She was pronounced dead at 11:10 p.m., the station reported.
Police Called the Shooting an Accident
In the hours after the shooting, investigators said a preliminary investigation determined the gunshot happened after a firearm was accidentally discharged, NBC4 reported at the time. That early police characterization lines up with what Frizzell's family and the Dispatch's reporting on the case describe: a gun that fired while Felix was cleaning it, rather than an intentional act.
Felix's reckless homicide plea falls under Ohio Revised Code section 2903.041, which classifies the offense as a felony of the third degree, according to the Ohio Revised Code. The Dispatch's report on the sentencing does not spell out the specific facts underlying the separate endangering-children charge or how it factored into Judge Young's final sentence. Carlie Frizzell's boyfriend and family have been left devastated by her loss, the Dispatch reported.
A Broader Pattern of Accidental Shootings
Frizzell's death adds to a grim national tally. Firearms have been the leading cause of death among U.S. children ages 1 to 17 since 2020, according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The school found there were 2,526 gun deaths among children in that age range in 2022 alone, averaging nearly seven deaths per day, and that the gun death rate for the group rose 106% between 2013 and 2022. Johns Hopkins researchers also found that Black children and teens had a gun death rate 18 times higher than white children in the same age group in 2022.
Guns discharging during cleaning are a recognized, if less common, cause of unintentional firearm deaths among minors. The Ohio Department of Health notes that unintentional deaths can occur when children play with guns or when guns fire while being cleaned. Separately, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has used national data spanning 2003 to 2021 to study unintentional firearm injury deaths among people ages 0 to 17, drawing on reports from 49 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Columbus has seen other accidental shootings involving minors in recent months. In May, police said a toddler gained access to an unattended firearm and accidentally shot himself in the city's southeast side, leading to charges against a man, according to 10TV. In late September, a teen in DeKalb County, Georgia, was shot after a gun accidentally discharged during cleaning, with the victim's mother's boyfriend later charged with reckless conduct, Atlanta News First reported.
