Federal prosecutors on April 21 charged Charles Ford, 56, with making false statements to federal agents and being a felon in possession of a firearm—the one that Shamar Elkins used to kill eight children in Louisiana in the early hours of Sunday.
Prosecutors traced the firearm, a .22-caliber Mossberg 715P, to Ford,
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Louisiana said that investigators found that the gun’s original purchaser, a woman who had since been hospitalized, had given it to Ford to hold.
When agents first questioned Ford after the Sunday massacre, he allegedly denied ever having possessed the weapon and acknowledged he was legally barred from doing so as a convicted felon. He later allegedly admitted to agents that he had kept the gun under the seat of his truck and that he suspected Elkins, who frequently rode with him, had stolen it in the weeks before the mass shooting….