COLUMBUS -- Jodi Sandoval is a smart, sweet, pretty woman with brown curly hair and a face so sad it breaks your heart.

We’re in the living room of her home, a two-family rental in a blue collar neighborhood about five miles east of downtown.

The room is clean but sparse. There’s the couch where we sit, two chairs, a couple bicycles leaning against the wall.

But all that matters in this room is the space she calls “Noah’s altar.”

Noah’s ashes are in front of the fireplace. Around the box is a Bible that belonged to Jodi’s late father, Noah’s tennis shoes, a few of his favorite candy bars, his baby blanket, a t-shirt and some matchbox cars, the type he used to chew the wheels off when he was a toddler.

Several times a day, Jodi and her four remaining children gather to light candles and some incense.

And they quietly remember the 14-year-old-boy smiling down on them in the large photo on the mantle.

“There’s nothing that can ever remove him from my heart, my mind, my thoughts,” says Jodi, who is hearing impaired but often talks in a tone that resembles a whisper. “Never. Not for a second.”

On the morning of July 5, 2012, Noah was playing at the home of his friend, Levi, who lived with his grandparents a few miles away. The boys were left alone with Levi’s 17-year-old sister and were searching around for a lighter to explode some leftover fireworks.

Instead of a lighter, Levi found a gun, a .45-caliber handgun lying behind a television set in his grandfather’s bedroom.

Levi removed the clip. Not knowing a bullet remained in the chamber, he pointed the gun at his friend and pulled the trigger.

Seconds later, Noah was dead.

As she tells the story, Jodi occasionally pauses to quietly weep.

I ask if there are times when she’s happy.

“I’m not sure what happiness means anymore. I know it will never mean to me what I thought it did. Part of me died that day.

“I have fleeting moments of something that resembles happiness. But there’s always this underlying sorrow. There’s like this thin sheet of ice and right beneath it is indescribable pain and loss.

For weeks after her son was killed, Jodi rarely left this room. “I could do nothing but sit here and be with him.”

Soon, Jodi will take her sorrow to South Carolina, where she’ll live with her boyfriend, the father of her sixth child, due in February.

But on Oct. 29, Jodi will be at the Statehouse, where she will testify in favor of House Bill 31, a law that would require "safe storage" or a trigger lock on guns whenever the adult possessing the weapon "knows or reasonably should know a minor is able to gain access to the firearm."

Inexplicably, Ohio has no such "safe storage" law. And a magnificent piece in the Sept. 28 New York Times documented that accidental shootings result in twice as many child firearm deaths nationwide as records seem to indicate.

The paper reported that, in Ohio, records show 21 children under age 15 were killed in accidental gun deaths between 1999 and 2012. Because of irregularities in how child shooting deaths are reported, the Times found the Ohio child death count was actually 47, more than double what the public has been told.

That story also gave lie to the National Rifle Association's assertion that a majority of those child deaths were caused by adult criminals mishandling guns. Instead, the Times reported a “vast majority” of the deaths were due to shootings that were done by another child or accidentally self-inflicted.

Democratic State Rep. Bill Patmon, the author of H.B. 31, is under no illusion that the Republican-run legislature, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the gun lobby, will pass his bill. But he said Noah's death was "a classic example of how, if the gun had been stored, this wouldn't have happened."

And the grandfather who left the handgun lying behind a television set would have likely ended up in jail.

But because Ohio has no safe storage law, Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien told me convicting the grandfather of a crime related to Noah’s death would have been highly unlikely.

So, lacking a safe storage law, prosecutors charged Levi as a juvenile. He was convicted of reckless homicide and placed on probation for a year.

“I objected to them charging Levi with anything,” said Jodi, “He’s going to have to forever live with the fact he killed his friend. He’s never going to be able to erase the vision of Noah dying. That’s enough punishment.

“Levi is not a criminal.”

But the law now considers him one.

And any legislator involved in killing this bill might as well be considered one also.

Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer's editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.