10-Year-Old Boy Charged With Felony For Playing With Toy Gun Outside

When a ten-year-old boy was playing with toy guns outside of his home in Fort Carson, Colorado, the police took notice and arrested him. Gavin, the boy, was charged with felony menacing, which is a serious Class 5 felony, which meant he could have been looking at some serious time in a juvenile detention center. However, Gavin’s family was able to fight the charge, and, given the offender’s age, the felony charge was eventually expunged from Gavin’s permanent record.

Gavin Carpenter was playing with toy guns when the police took notice and arrested him. According to the underage boy, he was playing a fast-paced version of Fortnite near N. Powers Blvd and Constitution Ave with one of his gun-loving friends.

In an interview with FOX21, Gavin Carpenter stated: “They came back over, told me my rights, and told me what was going to happen. They put handcuffs on me, and I got into the car.”

Gavin did not understand why he wasn’t allowed to play with toy guns outside of his home in the community. He even explained that the toy was a Nerf model that can be purchased at most retailers that sell such products.

“The toy bow was an orange Nerf bow. It didn’t work. Nothing could shoot out of it. Nothing would come out of it. The weapon, well, the toy I had, had an orange tip. It was also broken and couldn’t shoot anything out of it,” he said.However, Gavin and his friend crossed a line when they began aiming their firearms at passing cards. The boys pretended to shoot about ten cars until one of the vehicles stopped to confront the troublemakers. The two boys fled from the driver of the car into the friend’s grandparents’ house to escape the confrontation.

“He slammed his breaks and started reversing as fast as he could. He came up and started getting very heated and was very mad. I was at the time, very scared,” Gavin said.

The driver called the police, and El Paso County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Gavin and his friend. The children were handcuffed and hauled away to the nearby Colorado Springs Police Department, where they were forced to pose for mugshots and get their fingerprints taken for processing.

“I told them I had no intention to have scared them or have any threat to their life,” Gavin stated.

Gavin’s parents, Chris and Stephanie, followed behind the police car that held Gavin and waited at the station for hours until Gavin was finally released at 10:30 pm that night. Gavin’s family hired an attorney to fight the felony menacing charge in an effort to get it expunged from the boy’s record. But on the day of Gavin’s court appearance, it did not seem hopeful that he’d get away with it.

“It was just a hard no, that the District Attorney wasn’t going to throw this out,” Chris said. “That is when we moved into the diversion program.”

Gavin was asked to perform community service, write an essay, and complete other tasks before the charge would be expunged from his record. It took Gavin 216 days to repair the damage to his reputation.

If there’s a lesson here, don’t point toy guns at passing cars – it is very threatening.