Dad Charged In Alleged Sororicide: I've Suffered Enough

INDIANAPOLIS -- The father of a 5-year-old boy who police say fatally shot his 4-year-old sister told reporters Thursday that neglect charges against him should be dropped, arguing the emotional pain he feels is punishment enough.

"I have to live with this for the rest of my life. I don't know if I can," James Michael Booher (pictured) tearfully said to reporters in an interview at the Marion County Jail.

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Slideshow: 5-Year-Old Fatally Shoots 4-Year-Old Sister

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But authorities argue the charges are warranted in part because Sunday's shooting was not the first time that Booher's son had found a gun at home and fired it.

"Booher knew that his son could get access to the gun," said Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi, who filed three felony counts of neglect against Booher on Thursday.

Police said the boy had a confrontation with his sister, Makayla Booher, on Sunday morning shortly before the shooting at their home in the 6100 block of Massachusetts Avenue. The boy went downstairs, used a chair to reach a gun at the top of a bookcase, went back upstairs and shot his sister at close range, police said.

Authorities said that eight months ago, when the family was living at a different Indianapolis home, the boy used a chair to reach his father's gun atop a refrigerator. On that day, he fired a bullet into a kitchen cupboard, police said.

James Booher was aware that his son "knew how to operate the gun and in fact had fired the gun eight months before," Brizzi said.

After Sunday's shooting, according to police, Booher told investigators he thought the .40-caliber semiautomatic gun had been stored unloaded because its magazine had been removed. Police said that despite the magazine's removal, a bullet still was in the gun.

Two years ago, police said, child welfare workers removed the children from their father because medical personnel learned that the girl had broken ribs. The welfare workers initially suspected abuse but eventually decided not to report the case to police, 6News' Jack Rinehart reported.

Authorities said Booher's home on Sunday contained weapons such as Chinese throwing stars and samurai swords. Brizzi said Booher's home was a dangerous environment.

"It wasn't just one thing that led to the charging decision. It was sort of a culmination of events -- the prior shooting, and all these weapons," Brizzi said. "If it wasn't the gun, it could have been any number of weapons that could have put these kids in a dangerous place."

Booher was arrested Wednesday at the conclusion of Makayla's funeral. According to the prosecutor's office, he had been hiding in the days after Sunday's shooting, and police decided to arrest him at the funeral in part because they considered him a flight risk, Rinehart reported.

In Thursday's interview at the jail, Booher said he perhaps "wasn't the safest person" and that he perhaps "should have done something different," but that he never intended harm to come to his children.

"I would never intentionally hurt my children or put them in harm's way, ever," he said.

He also had a message for his son: "That it wasn't his fault and that daddy still loves him very much."

Booher was charged with two Class D felony counts of neglect and one Class A count, which itself carries a penalty of between 20 to 50 years in prison with a conviction.

Makayla's mother, Michelle Vensko, told 6News Wednesday that she doesn't think he should be charged.

The boy and his teenage sister, who was also home at the time of the shooting, were placed in foster care.