Cartier Smith, age 3, male, Black, was found with a single gunshot wound inside a southeast Columbus apartment on Kodiak Drive after getting hold of an unsecured handgun. Police were dispatched at 8:55 a.m., and medics rushed him to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead less than an hour later. Investigators determined that the child accessed a firearm that had been placed between a mattress and the wall, within reach when he entered the bedroom that morning.
A Columbus Division of Police media bulletin identifies the victim as “Cartier Smith,” age 3, and records the incident location and timeline. Obituary notices and memorial pages list his date of death as September 22, 2025, while the police release describes the emergency call occurring on the morning of September 18 and notes the child was pronounced deceased at 9:51 a.m., a discrepancy that has appeared across subsequent news coverage and memorials.
Detectives concluded the shooting was unintentional but preventable. According to charging documents summarized by local outlets, the gun had been brought to the home by a 31-year-old visitor, identified as Sean Perrin. The child's mother, 29-year-old Carley Dials, told investigators she picked the handgun up from the bedroom floor around 3 a.m. and placed it between the mattress and the wall before going back to sleep as the visitor remained beside her. Hours later, Cartier entered the room, found the weapon, and it discharged, fatally wounding him.
Arrests followed quickly. Carley Dials was arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter and booked into the Franklin County Jail; a Columbus police media bulletin lists her as the suspect on that charge and notes that the investigation is ongoing. Sean Perrin, who was legally prohibited from possessing a firearm, fled the scene before officers arrived but was later located and arrested; he was booked on a weapons-under-disability charge. Coverage also notes that Dials' bond was set at $50,000 as the case moved into the courts.
Local and national reports consistently frame the case as an accidental, self-inflicted shooting by a child who encountered an unsecured firearm in the home. Newsrooms in Columbus documented the 911 call shortly before 9 a.m., the transport to the hospital, and the boy's death that morning; national outlets subsequently echoed those findings while emphasizing the sequence of decisions that made the weapon accessible to a toddler. Memorial pages created by family and community members later honored Cartier Smith, age 3, and fixed his date of death as September 22, 2025, reflecting how loved ones chose to mark the loss even as official records describe the events of September 18.
