Mishawaka police are investigating the fatal shooting Saturday of a 10-year-old girl.
It happened in a house at the corner of Taylor and 5th streets. Police responded there to find 10-year-old Sophia Burks dead from a gunshot wound.
A police spokesman Monday said he didn’t yet know if detectives consider the shooting accidental. But police arrested 17-year-old Jacob Olvera on charges of possessing a machine gun, dangerous possession of a firearm, and criminal recklessness as a Level 6 felony.
Police said Olvera is the boyfriend of Sophia’s older sister, who also lives in the house. Olvera was being detained at the Juvenile Justice Center, where he was awaiting formal charges.
Indiana Code states that “a machine gun is defined as any weapon that shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
Last January we reported on a growing problem police are seeing with people modifying handguns for rapid fire by using a plastic switch to override the trigger bar.
