NEW ORLEANS (InvestigateTV) — Thomas Belton still gets anxious when he thinks about a phone call he received that set off emotions of sadness, anger and a demand for changes. “She was crying over the phone,” Belton recalled the emotional phone call with his daughter’s mother. “She said, Kennedi was killed at a sleepover.”Kennedi Belton, 15, died when a teenager in another room was tinkering with a weapon and it went off.
Documents from the New Orleans Police Department show on January 29, 2023, detectives arrived at a shooting call and found the 15-year-old suffering from a gunshot wound to her chest/stomach area on her left side. At the scene, 19-year-old Andre Skinner told detectives he mishandled a firearm in a connecting bedroom and it discharged. Evidence reports indicate the firearm was untraceable, a Polymer80, 9mm caliber semi-automatic pistol with no serial number. Records show one fired 9mm caliber cartridge case was recovered from the chamber of the Polymer 80, and one unknown caliber brass projectile was recovered during the autopsy of Kennedi. The weapon was test-fired and was consistent with the projectile recovered at the scene. “I didn’t believe it at first,” Belton said. “It was just a big heartbreak for me, a real big heartbreak.”
Unknown to Belton at the time, the gun that killed his daughter was a ghost gun — a street name for a weapon without a serial number. The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) refers to ghost guns as privately made firearms, or PMFs. InvestigateTV found that when Belton was killed, she joined hundreds of other victims of homicides and attempted homicides in which the weapons used were untraceable. Despite the proliferation of these weapons from coast to coast, InvestigateTV found there’s a lack of uniform reporting on ghost guns and some agencies said that they are not tracking that data at all.
Belton said his daughter Kennedi loved to smile and crack jokes. He recalled her being loved by everyone who met her. “Her older sister is a nurse, and she wanted to be a nurse like her older sister,” Belton said. “She was a bright light that got extinguished too early.”
Belton said in his daughter’s 15 short years on Earth, she was caring, smart and respected by people who met her at school and beyond.
“She was beautiful, beautiful, soul, beautiful spirit, beautiful person,” Belton said. “I believe had she had the opportunity to continue to live her life. I think she could have changed the world. That’s just how bright, smart and great she was.”As detectives pieced together what happened at the scene, Skinner was charged with negligent homicide and negligent injuring. Later that same year, Skinner ultimately took responsibility for his actions, entering a guilty plea in court.
The weapon that was used in the shooting was assembled with pieces and parts from a company called Polymer80, one of the largest manufacturers of kits for making homemade, untraceable ghost guns.
Ghost guns are untraceable because the weapons do not have serial numbers and don’t require any sort of background checks. The guns can be assembled using parts that are ordered online.
“When you and I want to go get a firearm, unless we are hobbyists, we go to an FFL (Federal Firearms License),” said Bernard Hansen, special agent in charge at the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Kansas City Field Office. “We go through the background check, we buy a gun, and we go shoot, hunt, whatever we like to do. For the criminal element. . . that step is eliminated.”
According to the ATF, this allows felons and other people prohibited by state and federal law from possessing them, this gives them an avenue to access. Without the ability to trace ghost guns, law enforcement investigations are challenged. Where and when a ghost gun was made, and who it was sold or transferred to, is next to impossible to track down. The ATF said those problems open the door for these weapons getting into the wrong hands.
In recent years, it’s become increasingly easy for people to get kits they purchase online to make weapons. Many of these weapons can be assembled in a short period of time and only require internet access, a credit card, and a 3D Printer.The largest manufacturer of the parts and kits used for ghost guns, Polymer80, recently ceased operating in July. According to news reports at the time, the owner of the company attributed it to the constant court battles the company was having to fight.
The ATF said that this is a problem that they have watched explode in recent years. Agency data shows that from Jan. 1, 2016, through Dec. 31, 2021, nearly 45,240 suspected PMFs were reported to the ATF as having been recovered by law enforcement from potential crime scenes. Those recoveries included 692 homicides or attempted homicides. In 2016, there were 1,758 PMFs recovered. In 2021, there were 19,344. to use“I would say we’ve seen a 1,000% increase, and I’m being conservative on that over the last five to eight years in recoveries,” Hansen said.
The ATF attributes this to an increase in PMFs on the streets and the education of law enforcement to identify and trace them. “I’ve been in law enforcement now for over 25 years, and this has become one of our major focuses in the Kansas City field division, as well as ATF,” Hansen said. “It’s just trying to take what limited resources we are to help the local departments through our, you know, area that we work in, educate them, assist them with whatever we can when appropriate, take the crimes federally to see for prosecution and or assist them whenever we can with their state and local prosecutions.”
InvestigateTV discovered that tracking of these weapons is spotty across America. InvestigateTV submitted public records requests in 12 cities to get their ghost gun data. Atlanta, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Portland responded and said that data is not tracked, or no records exist.
Through those public records requests, InvestigateTV obtained ghost gun data from the following cities from 2021-2023 that shows the number of PMFs they’ve recovered:
Las Vegas, 1092Kansas City, 128New Orleans, 97Cincinnati, 10Nashville began tracking ghost guns in 2023. Since then and through the beginning of November, the city has logged 56 ghost gun recoveries.
Although the ATF tracks data through firearms tracking programs, InvestigateTV found that doesn’t mean all ghost gun data makes it there. The discrepancy could be a result of different terms used to describe ghost guns.
For example, Polymer80s which are made with kits online and other hobbyist guns without serial numbers could be classified as PMFs while other cities may call them ghost guns or unserialized weapons. Without universal terms, tracking them is impossible. All of this has fueled a big education push for law enforcement across America about what ghost guns are and the need to get everyone to use the same words to describe the weapons.
“Sometimes when terms and street vernacular take over, it’s just what society refers to them as, but us training the locals whether it’s police officers, sheriff’s department, deputies, prosecutors, it’s getting everybody on the same page so they understand what they’re looking at,” Hansen said.
The proliferation of ghost guns and the problems associated with them caused the ATF to issue federal rules to update the regulatory definition of a firearm and frame or receiver. The new rule updated the definitions of firearm and frame or receiver to include changes in firearm design and making. It also set new definitions for Privately Made Firearms (PMFs). This was the first time the Gun Control Act of 1968 had been updated since its enactment, according to the ATF. The Gun Control Act of 1968 was legislation that regulated the commerce of firearms and licensing. Following the assassinations of President John Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Gun Control Act was passed which implemented more stringent licensing and regulation on the firearms industry. It also established new firearms offenses and prohibited the sale of firearms and ammunition to convicted felons and other prohibited people. With the changes to the rules, pushed by the Biden administration in 2022, a prohibition took effect banning the business of manufacturing ghost guns and “buy, build, shoot” kits that people were easily able to purchase online without a background check.
This rule changed the meaning of the term “firearms” which now placed them under the Gun Control Act. As a result, commercial manufacturers of such kits must become licensed dealers and include serial numbers on the kits’ frame or receiver, and commercial sellers of these kits must become federally licensed and run background checks prior to a sale – just like they have to do with other commercially-made firearms.The final rule is intended to also help turn some ghost guns already in circulation into serialized firearms. In 2022, Texas residents Jennifer VanDerStok and Michael Andren challenged the final rule that banned them from purchasing products that they wanted to use to manufacture their own firearms. In court documents, they noted that they both own components that they intend to manufacture into firearms for personal use. They sued the U.S. Attorney General, the Department of Justice, ATF and the ATF director over the final rule and asked for a nationwide injunction to prevent them from enforcing it. They argued that the final rule exceeded the ATF’s authority.A federal judge in Texas ruled in their favor, striking down the ban. That was upheld by a federal appeals court in Louisiana that reaffirmed the Texas decision. However, that was short-lived. In October the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay of the ban until all appeals are adjudicated including any appeals that were filed with the Supreme Court. Justices are expected to render a decision during this term which ends in late June.
As that decision plays out, a handful of states have enacted their own regulations and bans on ghost guns and parts without serial numbers.
As Belton waits to see what the Supreme Court might do, he wants to make sure no one experiences the hurt that now defines him. In addition to losing a loved one from a ghost gun, he’s also trying to figure out why there wasn’t a standard sentencing protocol for his daughter’s killer, Andre Skinner.
Skinner could have received up to five years in prison, but he didn’t get one day of prison time. Instead, he was given three years of probation and a fine that his family said was well below what he should have received for killing Belton. “You can actually take someone’s life, whether it’s an accident or not, and just get three years probation,” Belton said. “Then he’s one year to go speak at a school. Like, who is he?”
More than a year after Kennedi’s death, Belton’s heartache lingers as he tries to digest what happened to his daughter and the lack of any prison time that accompanied her tragic death.
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