A masked gunman opened fire on a crowd of people in the Bronx, hitting a 15-year-old girl with a stray bullet that remained in the teen’s body Tuesday, threatening to damage her vital organs, her outraged mother said.
“They can’t take the bullet out,” said the teen’s mom, who wished not to be named, as the adolescent remained in Jacobi Medical Center. “[The doctors] went in with little incisions, and they said if that don’t work they gotta do a big one in the middle of her stomach.
“They said it fractured her pelvic bone,” the mom, 37, said. “We gotta wait for the special team to come in and see what they gonna do about her pelvic bone.”
The teen was hanging out with three of her brothers and a sister in a courtyard across the street from her building near E. 183rd St. and Crotona Ave. in Belmont — about two blocks from the Bronx Zoo — when shots rang out about 6:45 p.m. Monday, cops said.
The shots came from six masked men riding three scooters that had circled the block more than a dozen times before opening fire, the mom said.
The girl was struck in the buttocks as she tried to run into the building, police and the child’s mother said.
The mom nearly ran into her child as everyone in the crowd sought cover, she recalled.
“She was running. She ran right into me,” she recalled. “She was, like, ‘Mom! I’m hit! I’m hit, mom!'”
The girl’s buttocks was covered in blood, she said.
Medics took her to Jacobi Hospital, where she remained Tuesday. The bullet is dangerously close to the child’s colon, her mother said.
“They said if it hit her colon, they’re gonna have to cut the colon and sew it back together,” she said, bitterly. “Every time when they freaking talk, they give me the chills, and make my body weak. I mean, oh, man, it’s so bad. It’s so bad.”
At least six shots were heard, witnesses told responding officers. Five shell casings were recovered.
The girl, who has no criminal history, is not believed to be the intended target, a police source said.
“She’s a quiet girl. She’s a tomboy,” her mother said. “She got brothers. She really does everything that the boys do.”
As she lay in a hospital bed, the teen, a ninth grader at the High School for Energy and Technology, appeared closed off and wasn’t dwelling on what happened, her mother said.
“She hides her feelings,” she said. “She didn’t cry or nothing. Not after surgery, not before surgery.”
The shooter sped off. A person of interest was taken into custody for questioning Monday night but no charges were immediately filed.
It was not immediately clear if the person of interest was the shooter or someone who knew the shooter.
The heartbroken mom said she felt something terrible was about to happen when she saw the masked men on the scooters.
“It was about six of them,” she recalled. “They all had masks, no face. My first thing is not to call the police — I have to call my children [first] to make sure they’re safe because we live here. They could just walk to the store and then be shot.”
When she reached out to her daughter, she said that she was in the courtyard, but wouldn’t go past the gate.
“I was hiding from [the suspects], too,” she recalled. “The boys circled so many times and they start looking at anybody. So I went in the store and hid.”
The gunplay comes as cops in the 48th Precinct tackle a 27% jump in shootings this year.
As of Oct. 13, cops had investigated 28 shootings within the precinct boundaries, six more than by this time last year, according to NYPD statistics.