Woman Indicted in Child’s Death at Party

     Jan. 11, 2022 – A Shelby County woman has been indicted on criminal charges in the death of an 11-year-old girl who was accidentally shot at a birthday party last summer with a handgun her friends found in a kitchen drawer, said Shelby County Dist. Atty. Gen. Amy Weirich.

    A grand jury indicted Rakasha Sims, 30, on criminally negligent homicide, two counts of aggravated child neglect, and one count of aggravated parental or custodial child endangerment. She is being held on $65,000 bond.

    The incident occurred on July 7, 2021, at Sims’ apartment on Nash Drive in southeast Shelby County near Stateline Road where her daughter was having a sleepover birthday party with three friends.

    Five children, including her daughter and her 4-year-old son, were left alone and unsupervised in the apartment when one of the girls found the loaded pistol while looking for silverware in the kitchen drawers.

   Investigators from the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said the girls passed the gun around and that it accidentally discharged as one of them was putting it back in the drawer. The shot struck 11-year-old Madison Jones in the head, killing her.

   The case is being handled by Asst. Dist. Attys. Dru Carpenter and Lessie Rainey of the District Attorney’s Special Victims Unit (SVU) which prosecutes cases involving rape, sexual abuse, and severe physical abuse of child victims, as well as elder abuse and vulnerable adult abuse.

   The SVU was created as an expansion of the multi-agency Child Protection Investigative Team or CPIT.