78-year-old Albert Grannon has been jailed for three years after he accidentally shot his 6-year-old grandson.
The child’s mother begged the judge to place him behind bars.
“Why did you take my little boy away?” the parents of the young boy asked Grannon.
According to expert analysis, the bullet went directly into Stanley Metcalf’s abdomen. He then said, “You shot me, granddad!”
Stanley’s heartbroken mother, Jenny Dees, said she hasn’t received any apology from Grannon, her grandfather.
The great-grandfather claimed that he pointed the gun at the child as he squeezed the trigger just to check it wasn’t loaded, ‘but not, of course, deliberately.’
But Stanley’s father Andrew Metcalf asked Grannon: “Why didn’t you check that gun, why did you point it at Stanley? Why did you take my little boy away?”
Grannon was jailed for three years for manslaughter and four months for possessing an air rifle without a license.
“You ended a young life and you brought lifelong grief and misery to his parents and to the whole of his family,” Mr. Justice Lavender, the judge, told Grannon, who showed no emotion as he stood in the dock at Sheffield Crown Court.
He added: “What you did was obviously a very dangerous thing to do. Why on earth did you do it?”
After Stanley was shot, he went into cardiac arrest on the way to a hospital and passed away two hours later.
“Not once did he say sorry. Now, if he did, it would be meaningless, too little, too late,” said Jenny Dees, Stanley’s mother.
At first, she felt sorry for her grandfather but now told the judge: “I don’t feel sorry for him now.” She added: “I cannot describe the pain of living every day without Stanley. The disbelief that he is not with us anymore is unbearable.
“We struggle to live, talk, eat and even breathe. It is so very hard to understand we are never going to see him again. Nothing will ever make this better and my heart is totally broken.
“I hope my Grandad can live with himself and the pain he has caused us, because living without Stanley and the massive hole it has left with all the unbearable pain, our life will never ever be the same again and has changed for ever.
“There are no winners in all of this but there are losers, and the biggest loser of all is my son, Stanley Andrew Metcalf.”
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