A 19-year-old woman died early Thursday morning after being shot in the head at a Lawrenceville home, and her boyfriend now faces criminal charges.

What It Means For You: Police say the shooting happened inside a home on Lauren Kay Court around 1:19 a.m. The suspect cooperated with police and remains in custody.

What Happened: Officers found the woman in an upstairs bedroom with a gunshot wound to her head. Medical workers pronounced her dead at the scene.

  • Police arrested 19-year-old Sebastian Prestridge and charged him with one count of involuntary manslaughter.
  • Everyone in the home at the time is cooperating with investigators.

Between the Lines: Involuntary manslaughter charges typically mean police believe the death was unintentional but resulted from reckless or negligent behavior. The charge is a felony in Georgia.

What We Don’t Know: Police have not released the victim’s name while they notify her family. Investigators have not shared details about what led to the shooting or how it happened.

Key Statistics on Firearms in the Home

  • More Risks Than Defense
    Research dating back to the late 1990s found that for every self-defense shooting in a home, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and eleven suicides linked to guns in that same setting.
  • Unintentional Shootings Are Common at Home
    From 2003 to 2021, 85% of accidental shootings involving children occurred in a home or apartment, and over half of those were in the victim’s own residence. In 2022, 78.3% of the 530 recorded unintentional shooting deaths happened in private residences—and more than half of those occurred in the victims’ own homes.
  • Children Bear the Brunt
    Between 2015 and 2021, 3,498 Americans died from unintentional gun injuries; 713 of them were children under 18.
  • No Protective Effect Found
    A Stanford-led study found no evidence that having a handgun in the home offered protection. Instead, it increased risk of assault and homicide.

The Sources: Lawrenceville Police Department.

B.T. Clark
Publisher at 

B.T. Clark is an award-winning journalist and the Publisher of The Georgia Sun. He has 25 years of experience in journalism and served as Managing Editor of Neighbor Newspapers in metro Atlanta for 15 years and Digital Director at Times-Journal Inc. for 8 years. His work has appeared in several newspapers throughout the state including Neighbor Newspapers, The Cherokee Tribune and The Marietta Daily Journal. He is a Georgia native and a fifth-generation Georgian.