PHOENIX — Moments after making Tuesday night spaghetti, a mother of two, Rosario Canales, lost her son to gun violence.
“He just got done eating dinner and he said, ‘Mom I'll be right back,’" remembered Canales.
Seventeen-year-old Marc Leyva was gunned down outside an apartment complex while visiting a friend near 7th and Southern avenues.
"I waited hours and hours to hear if my son was OK, anything at all," cried Canales. She feared the worst when her son went silent.
His mother tells ABC15 she found out about the shooting on Facebook and received confirmation hours later it was her son who had been killed.
Leyva is the fifth teenager in the Valley in recent weeks to be shot and killed.
“All these shootings, all these kids dying so young. This gun violence... that needs to stop,” pleaded Canales.
RELATED: Preventing violence: Talking with your teen after string of Valley teen deaths
Police have not released information about a suspect in this case.
This month, the Arizona Department of Health Services released its Child Fatality Report.
A total of 59 children died from firearm injuries in 2022, up slightly from 56 in 2021.
For the second year in a row, firearm injuries are the leading cause of death for teens 15 to 17.
DATA: A look at homicide trends in the Valley
Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell addressed the crisis Wednesday.
“We've become aware that there is a glitch for lack of a better term in the law,” Mitchell explained. “Where we have parents that are calling the police saying, ‘We don't want our child to have a gun’. But yet, the law allows a child to possess a gun within the house. And so, we've asked the legislature to take a look at that and to fix that loophole.”
Arizona does not have a Safe Storage Law or Child Access Prevention law that requires unattended firearms to be stored a certain way or have a locking device.
