A Bronx man was arraigned Tuesday on a weapons charge and ordered to stay away from his 8-year-old son, who was fighting for his life a day after he accidentally shot himself in the head with his father’s gun in their home.
Rajon Grant, 43, was also charged with endangering the welfare of a child and issued a six-month order of protection as the boy lay in a medically induced coma at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Columbia as anxious family members awaited news about his fate.
Cops said the child was critically wounded while playing with an unlicensed 9-mm. handgun that he had found in an unlocked safe in a closet at his University Heights home just before 12:30 p.m. Monday.
Medics rushed him to the hospital with a wound to his head. Cops confirmed the child was out of surgery and expected to survive, but said doctors were still determining the damage done in the horrifying incident.
Prosecutors rapped Grant for being so reckless.
“The defendant kept an unlicensed firearm in his room in a safe where his child was able to gain access to it,” said assistant Bronx DA Jaime Breslin. “The firearm did discharge, and struck him in the right side of the head.”
Breslin said the boy was not being supervised at the time of the shooting. His father wasn’t home, and his mother was in the basement of the building on Fordham Hill Oval near Sedgwick Ave., Breslin said.
The prosecutor added that the other children who live there were removed from the home and will be cared for by Grant’s mother.
Judge Shari Michels set a cash bail of $5,000.
“For now there is not to be any contact between you and your child for the next six months,” Michels said. “You are not to send him any message. Should he try to contact you, you must not respond to him.”
Grant’s lawyer, Marian Mikhail, had argued against the protection order saying the decree would make Grant homeless, and keep him from being involved with his family.
“He has been involved all his life,” Mikhail said. “The family relies on him to provide for them because the child’s mother is also not working at this time.”
Mikhail described Grant, a fiber optics maintenance technician, as a “stellar employee” and “family man,” but did not offer an explanation about why the unlicensed gun was in the house.
