DELRAY BEACH, Florida — It started as something teenagers do without thinking twice. A group of friends, a revolver sitting on the counter, and the assumption that it wasn’t loaded.
That assumption cost a 16-year-old boy his life — and sent his friend to prison for more than a decade.
A Night That Went Horribly Wrong
In January 2016, a group of teens gathered at a residence on Sawpine Drive in Delray Beach. At some point during the night, they began dry firing a revolver — pulling the trigger on what everyone believed was an empty weapon.
It wasn’t empty.
At 11:10 p.m., 17-year-old Saam Rajaei called 911. He was barely holding it together on the phone.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” he told the dispatcher.
In the background, another friend’s voice is heard asking what happened. Rajaei’s response was captured on the call: “He tried to get the gun… I put my finger on the trigger accidentally and shot him.”
His friend and Olympic Heights High School classmate, James Cartigiano, was found on the kitchen floor — unresponsive, a single gunshot wound to his head.
He was 16 years old.
Five Days. Then Gone.
Paramedics arrived and rushed Cartigiano to Delray Medical Center, where he was taken immediately into surgery.
He never woke up. James died five days after being shot.
The two other teenagers who had been there earlier that night were not in the room when the gun went off.
A Decade-Long Wait for Accountability
Rajaei later gave conflicting accounts to investigators. He first said the two struggled over the gun before it fired. Later, he changed his story — saying there was no struggle, that he simply picked it up and pulled the trigger by accident.
Nearly a decade after that night, a Palm Beach County jury found him guilty of manslaughter this past May.
Last Friday, 15th Circuit Court Judge Sherri Collins handed down the sentence: 124 and a half months in prison. That is just over ten years behind bars for a split second of carelessness with a loaded weapon.
One night. One loaded gun nobody thought to check. One family that never got their son back.
Does this case make you think differently about how firearms are stored in homes with teenagers? Share your thoughts in the comments below.