Corey Torres

LORAIN — A 17-year-old Lorain boy, killed Saturday when he accidentally shot himself, was the baby of his family, but he looked forward to becoming a man.

Corey Torres wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps with aspirations of joining the Navy and serving his country, said his mother, Angie Morris.

But those dreams vanished when he began toying with a .38-caliber revolver Saturday afternoon in his Lorain Drive home.

Now with her only son gone, Morris said she intends to preserve his memory with a message.

“Young people need to know gunplay is dangerous,” she said. “If you don’t know anything about handling guns, you shouldn’t touch them or mess with them.”

Corey had been in his living room with a 14-year-old girl when he began toying with the gun.

County Coroner Paul Matus said Corey dumped out the gun’s bullets and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened.

He then put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger a second time and the gun went off — killing him.

Lorain police found him on his couch with the gun in his hand and the bullets in his lap.

The girl told police that Corey held the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger, describing the action with a reference to Russian roulette.

Police don’t suspect he was playing the game and determined, with the help of Matus, that the shooting death was an accident.

“I don’t think it was anything like (Russian roulette),” said Lorain police Sgt. Mark Carpentiere. “It appears he thought the gun was unloaded. Why he put it to his head, we don’t know.”

Matus said he’s seen a number of instances throughout his career when playing with guns ended tragically.

“I’ve seen a number of these incidents in my lifetime,” he said. “It’s a tragedy when people fool around with guns and make a mistake like that.”

Police are still tracing the purchase point of the gun, which Carpentiere described as an older-style revolver, but Morris suspects he may have gotten the gun from their Leavitt Homes neighborhood.

Corey was a sophomore at Admiral King High School and enjoyed playing cards with family, in addition to playing basketball and baseball with friends.

When he wasn’t spending time with family and friends, his mother said, he enjoyed listening to a wide variety of music and had a wonderful sense of humor.

“He just had this way of lighting up a room,” she said. “He was always trying to bring up everybody’s spirits.”

Morris described her son as always having an outgoing attitude, and said the loss of her only boy would always be with her.

“He just really had an outlook on life that he was invincible,” she said. “He had this motto — loyalty and love. Everyone wants to be loyal, but you think about these things later — did you have enough time to love?”

Contact Stephen Szucs at 329-7129 or sszucs@chroniclet.com.

 

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