A 15-year-old boy was treated at Christian Northeast Hospital in St. Louis County after suffering a gunshot wound to his foot, and police are still trying to piece together where the shooting happened and whether it was accidental or intentional.
What Police Know So Far
According to STLtoday.com, officers were called to the hospital about 1:15 a.m. Sunday after the teen arrived with the injury. A separate account from firstalert4.com places the incident around 10 a.m. near Portage Drive and Collett Drive — a detail that doesn't line up neatly with the overnight hospital call time reported by the Post-Dispatch. Neither account resolves the discrepancy, and it remains unclear exactly when or where the shooting took place.
What both reports agree on is that the boy's injury is considered non-life-threatening, per the same St. Louis County outlet. St. Louis County police are continuing to investigate where the shooting occurred and whether it was accidental or intentional, with no further update yet on how the teen came to be shot.
A Pattern Seen Across The Region
Cases like this one aren't isolated. A study covering 2008 through 2013 found that 398 children age 16 or younger were treated for firearm-related injuries at two St. Louis-area emergency rooms, and 20 of them later died, according to St. Louis Children's Hospital. About 82% of those firearm injuries and deaths involved boys, and the median age of the victims was 15 — matching the age of the teen treated this weekend.
That same study found that 35% of the firearm injuries resulted from accidental shootings, with the rest caused by assaults, and that nearly 75% of the accidental shootings happened inside the home. More than half of all the shootings in the study occurred between 6 p.m. and midnight, and nearly one-third of the injuries clustered in just seven ZIP codes spanning the city of St. Louis and neighboring north St. Louis County.
The National Picture Is Getting Worse
The weekend shooting also arrives amid a troubling national trend. The number of U.S. youth ages 17 and younger who died by firearm rose 68% over the decade through 2024, according to KFF. Firearm deaths among that age group have outpaced motor-vehicle deaths every year since 2020, the health policy research group reports.
The firearm death rate among children and adolescents held at 3.5 per 100,000 from 2021 through 2023 before easing to 3.0 per 100,000 in 2024 — still above pre-pandemic levels, KFF found. Gun-assault deaths in that age group peaked at 1,674 in 2022 and fell to 1,337 in 2024, though assaults have accounted for at least three out of five firearm deaths among children and adolescents since 2020.
The risk is not spread evenly. Adolescents ages 12 to 17 had a firearm death rate of 7.5 per 100,000 in 2024, compared with just 0.6 per 100,000 for children 11 and younger, KFF reports. Boys ages 17 and younger were five times more likely than girls to die by firearm that year, at 5.0 per 100,000 versus 1.0 per 100,000. KFF also estimates that for every firearm fatality, at least two people survive their firearm injuries — a ratio that underscores how the St. Louis County teen's non-life-threatening wound fits into a much larger and largely unseen toll.
No arrests or additional details have been released in connection with Sunday's shooting, and St. Louis County police have not said when they expect to determine exactly what happened.
