Advertisement 13-year-old accidentally kills himself while friends watched on Instagram Live "My daughter screamed and said, ‘Mom turn his phone off!'" Share Shares Copy Link Copy

Shaniqua Stephens told WXIA 11 she’d just watched her son take the trash out of their Forest Park, Georgia, home when she heard “a big boom.” Her 13-year-old son Malachi Hemphill had returned to his room and accidentally shot himself while forty to fifty friends watched on Instagram Live.Stephens told the station her son did not own a gun and that he got this one from a friend of a friend; she also said his door was locked (which it never usually was) when she and her daughter went running upstairs to investigate the noise. “We kicked in the door. We found him just laying there in a pool of blood," she said. "My daughter screamed and said, ‘Mom turn his phone off!' As I proceeded to look at his phone he was on Instagram Live.”About forty to fifty kids were waiting outside the house as Stephens brought Malachi down to the car to rush him to the hospital: "I guess these were the kids that were watching on live that live in the area. I guess when it happened they just ran over here.” He died at the hospital soon after.According to the Huffington Post UK, people watching Malachi live on Instagram urged him to put the safety on the gun but the gun fired as he attempted to do so. Instagram hasn’t yet commented on the incident but Stephens hopes, if anything, Malachi’s story will be a reminder to parents to be cognizant of what their children are doing on social media: "Monitor their phones, just monitor your children. More now than anything.”