A 10-Year-Old Is Charged With Murder in St. Louis — and a Gun Under a Mattress Tells the Rest.

On Friday, June 26, 2026, just after 4 p.m., St. Louis police were called to the 8400 block of North Broadway in the city’s Baden neighborhood. They found a 7-month-old girl with a gunshot wound. Officers did not wait for an ambulance — they carried the baby into a patrol car and rushed her to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead. She has been identified by police as Kiyomi Parker.

What followed is one of the most disturbing charging decisions a Missouri court has ever recorded. The St. Louis juvenile court issued a first-degree murder charge against a 10-year-old boy who, according to police, picked up a handgun and fired the shot that killed her. By First Alert 4’s research, he appears to be the youngest child in Missouri history to be charged with murder.

Both the child and the adult later charged in the case are presumed innocent. This page lays out what is known and documented: who was hurt, what police allege, where the gun came from, and why a case this shocking will not be tried in an adult courtroom. The 10-year-old is a minor and is not named here.

• 7 months old — the age of Kiyomi Parker, the infant fatally shot in the Baden neighborhood of north St. Louis · Source: ABC7; First Alert 4
• 10 years old — the age of the boy charged by the juvenile court with first-degree murder; police say he pulled the trigger · Source: First Alert 4; FOX 2
• Murder 1st — the charge the juvenile court issued, per police spokesperson Mitch McCoy — likely the youngest murder defendant in Missouri history · Source: First Alert 4
• Under a mattress — where the gun was stored, according to the probable-cause statement; the child knew where it was and had handled it before · Source: First Alert 4
• Age 12 — Missouri's minimum age to certify a juvenile as an adult for serious felonies — set by a 2024 law — so a 10-year-old cannot be tried as an adult · Source: RSMo § 211.071
• 2nd shooting that week — police described this as the second minor shot and killed in the city of St. Louis in a single week · Source: First Alert 4

The call came in on a Friday afternoon. According to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, officers responding to the 8400 block of North Broadway — a residential stretch of the Baden neighborhood near Halls Ferry Road in north St. Louis — found a 7-month-old girl who had been shot. Rather than wait for a medical unit, officers performed what police call a “scoop and go”: they put the baby in the back of a patrol car, with one officer continuing life-saving efforts in the back seat while others cleared traffic ahead. She was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Police identified the infant as Kiyomi Parker. According to investigators, the shooting happened inside a home, and a 7-year-old child was also present. Witnesses at the scene told police that a 10-year-old had picked up a gun and fired the shot that struck the baby. The boy was taken into custody the same day.

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The day after the shooting, the St. Louis juvenile court issued a charge of first-degree murder against the 10-year-old. Police spokesperson Mitch McCoy announced it plainly: “The Juvenile Courts have issued a Murder 1st charge against a 10-year-old boy that pulled the trigger.” The department did not release the child’s name, consistent with juvenile confidentiality.

The age is what makes this case so extraordinary. By First Alert 4’s research, this is the youngest child in Missouri history to be charged with murder. It is a charge, not a conviction, and the boy is presumed innocent — but the very existence of a first-degree murder count against a child who has not yet finished elementary school is a marker of how far this case sits outside anything the system was built to handle.

For a child this young, “charged with murder” does not mean what it means for an adult. The case proceeds through the juvenile system, which is built around the question of what to do with a child — supervision, treatment, placement — rather than punishment. Section 04 walks through why the law forecloses an adult prosecution entirely.

The most consequential fact in this case is not the child’s age. It is how a 10-year-old had a loaded handgun in his hands at all. On June 28, prosecutors answered that question. Ca’Marion Pawnell, 19 — the infant’s father — was charged with second-degree felony murder, one count of endangering the welfare of a child resulting in death, and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child creating substantial risk. He was being held with no bond.

According to the probable-cause statement, Pawnell stored a gun underneath a mattress in a bedroom in the home. The 10-year-old told police he knew where the gun was, that it had been accessible to him for an extended period of time, and that he had taken it out and handled it before. Pawnell, police said, confirmed the gun was his and that he had placed it under the mattress — exactly where the boy described.

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That is the consequence axis of this story. A 7-month-old is dead, a 10-year-old faces a murder charge, and a 7-year-old witnessed it — and the thread running through all three is a loaded firearm left within reach of children for an extended period. Missouri has no general law requiring firearms to be stored locked away from minors; accountability here runs through the child-endangerment statutes rather than any safe-storage mandate. Pawnell is presumed innocent of the charges against him.

Even a first-degree murder charge cannot move a 10-year-old into adult court in Missouri. Until recently, it could have. For years, Missouri set no minimum age at which a child could be certified — transferred — to stand trial as an adult for a serious felony. A 2024 law changed that, establishing a floor: a juvenile must be at least 12 years old to be certified as an adult for offenses such as first- or second-degree murder.

That is why this case stays in juvenile court no matter how grave the allegation. The juvenile system is oriented toward what happens to the child — supervision, treatment, placement, and at the outer limit, detention — not toward an adult sentence. There is no scenario under current Missouri law in which a 10-year-old serves an adult prison term for this. For many readers that will feel like a gap; for others, it is exactly what a juvenile system is supposed to do with a child too young to be held to adult culpability. Both reactions describe the same statute.

“The Juvenile Courts have issued a Murder 1st charge against a 10-year-old boy that pulled the trigger.”

Mitch McCoy, St. Louis Metropolitan Police spokesperson

Police framed this not as an isolated horror but as part of a stretch: they described the death of Kiyomi Parker as the second minor shot and killed in the city of St. Louis in a single week. That context matters, because the impulse after a case like this is to focus entirely on the most shocking detail — the age of the accused — and miss the ordinary failure underneath it.

The ordinary failure is an accessible gun in a home with small children. The 10-year-old, by his own account to police, had known for some time where the firearm was kept and had handled it before. Nothing about that is unique to one family or one neighborhood; it is the precondition that turns a moment of childhood curiosity into a homicide. The accountability the system can still impose lands on the adult who allegedly left the gun within reach — not on a 10-year-old who, under Missouri law, is not even old enough to face an adult court.

On June 26, 2026, 7-month-old Kiyomi Parker was shot and killed in north St. Louis. A 10-year-old — apparently the youngest murder defendant in Missouri history — was charged with first-degree murder in juvenile court, where the case will stay because a 2024 state law bars certifying anyone under 12 as an adult. The infant’s 19-year-old father, Ca’Marion Pawnell, was charged with second-degree murder and child endangerment for allegedly leaving a loaded handgun under a mattress within a child’s reach. Both the boy and his father are presumed innocent. The hardest fact to sit with is the simplest one: a child died because a gun was where a child could find it. We will update this page as the juvenile proceeding and the adult prosecution move forward.

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