Jace “Chunky” Eric Scott, a 3-year-old Black male from Flint, Michigan, was rushed to Hurley Medical Center late on the night of May 17, 2020, after a gunshot inside his family’s home on Cadillac Street. Police were alerted when the child was brought in by a private vehicle rather than by ambulance, and the frantic dash to the emergency room ended with doctors pronouncing him dead a short time later.
Early reports described the shooting as appearing accidental and self-inflicted,
with investigators focusing on how a firearm was accessed inside the residence rather than searching for an outside attacker. The scene centered on an upstairs bedroom: authorities said the adults in the home had been downstairs watching television, and moments after the children went upstairs, a single gunshot rang out. When they raced up, they found Jace on the top bunk with a head wound, and a 9mm handgun nearby.
In the first days after the death, officials said there were no suspects being sought in the traditional sense, because the evidence pointed inward to the home and the handling of the gun. The city’s mayor issued a public statement of condolence as the neighborhood absorbed the news, while detectives worked to reconstruct what happened in the minutes before the shot and to determine how the weapon had been stored and who had possessed it.
By the end of May 2020, the case shifted from a tragic investigation to a criminal prosecution. Genesee County’s prosecutor announced charges against the child’s parents, Kala Marshea White and Jaqualein Ovaiarie Scott-Bradley, alleging that the shooting was preventable and tied to failures in safe handling and storage of the firearm. White was charged with involuntary manslaughter, multiple second-degree child abuse counts related to leaving a loaded gun accessible and committing abuse in the presence of another child, and felony-firearm counts carrying mandatory prison time. Scott-Bradley faced the same core charges and additional counts alleging illegal firearm possession, including being a felon in possession of a firearm, along with an additional felony-firearm charge.
Public reporting on the incident largely concentrated on the circumstances of the shooting and the filing of charges, framing the case as a stark warning about unsecured guns in homes with children. Widely circulated accounts from that period did not consistently provide later courtroom outcomes such as plea deals, trial verdicts, or sentencing details, but they did identify White and Scott-Bradley as the defendants accused of criminal responsibility in connection with Jace’s death.
