Earl Wilson’s 10-year-old daughter Ariana was relaxing on the sofa in their Hartford, Connecticut, home when a gunman sent a barrage of bullets through the living room window. One of the rounds struck Ariana in the head, severely injuring her. The shooting was carried out with a handgun reported stolen months earlier from a unlocked car in the suburban town of Glastonbury.
The Trace partnered with more than a dozen NBC TV stations as part of our yearlong investigation into the link between stolen guns and violent crime. With NBC Connecticut, we identified more than 1,000 stolen weapons in the state, including many that were later used in crimes. They include a handgun plucked from a car in a Cheshire driveway and later used to rob a mall, and a pistol left in the bed of a pickup truck that, four years later, was connected to a homicide.
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