According to police, a baby girl is in critical condition after being struck by a stray bullet. During a car ride with her mother in the Bronx on Wednesday, an 11-month-old girl was hit on the cheek by a bullet that came from a nearby gun. She is now in critical condition.
New York police say that the girl, who turned one on Friday and had to be intubated, was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx first. She was then taken to the Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. Police later said that her condition was critical but stable and that she was still alive.
It was the latest in a series of violent events that have put New Yorkers on edge and put Mayor Eric Adams’s promise to improve public safety to the test. During the pandemic, some crimes went up. In some parts of the city, there has been a big rise in the use of guns.
Afterward, Adams met with the girl’s family at the hospital, says a spokesman. From there, the mayor went to the shooting site to meet with investigators, meet anti-violence activists, and speak to the press.
Adams said that the incident should be seen as a “wake-up call.” He said that violent criminals, especially those who have weapons charges, should be held for longer before they are arrested. He asked the city’s district attorneys and state legislators to follow his lead, and they should do the same thing.
As he said, “It was a total disregard for the innocent people who were walking these streets when you look at the video.” This is likely what he meant when he talked about security footage. Here, our kids should not grow up. We also need help.
An officer said that the girl and her mother were in their car when a gunman chased another man across the street from the Grand Concourse and fired at least two shots at Valentine Avenue. The shooting happened around 6:45 pm near the intersection of Valentine and East 198th Street.
This is what the police say: One of the shots made its way thru a back door and hit a baby’s cheek before landing in the front seat.
“He ran out when he heard his wife scream and saw her holding his baby in a pink coat, stained with red blood from her child,” said Mr. Adams. The father was in a nearby drug store at the time of the shooting. A few hours later, the blood-stained jacket was still on the ground near where the police were working.
One of the two men who were in the shooting ran away. No one was in custody, and the police said that the investigation was still going on.
When it comes to guns and gun control in the United States,
“They are the foundation of our city,” the mayor said of the girl’s parents. When he met them at the hospital, “the first thing the mother did when she came in was grab our hands and pray.” Mr. Adams said that the couple has two more children, which is true.
He met with a group of anti-violence activists before talking to the media. He was wearing a police department jtoket with the word “Mayor” on it. People who say that we shouldn’t keep people who shoot guns to death in prison later slammed them in a news conference.
Afterward, Shanequa Charles, one of the activists he had just talked to, said that focusing on incarceration didn’t get to the root of the problem.
“We can be very angry with the person who pulled the trigger, but we can also be very angry at the situation that led to yet another one of our babies getting hurt,” said the executive director of a youth-development nonprofit in the Bronx. We also need to ask ourselves, as we’re angry about the way things are, “What caused them?”
A 40-year-old woman was shoved into the path of a subway train at the Times Square station in New York City last weekend. She was killed. Adam’s term began on January 1. The police said a homeless man who was once deemed too mentally ill to stand trial on drug-related charges had confessed to the killing.
It happened about a week ago in East Harlem. A 19-year-old officer was shot and killed by someone who was taking money from a Burger King. An off-duty police officer was shot in the head while sleeping in his car outside a station house on New Year’s Day.
This happened the nite before, and about a mile from where a police officer was shot in the Bronx. The baby was shot on Wednesday.
Officials haven’t released the name of the suspect in the shooting of the police officer. The 16-year-old, whose name hasn’t been released, has been charged with attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon.
In the case of a gun arrest last year, the teen was sentenced to probation last month. The gun he had with him on Tuesday was stolen in South Carolina in 2020, they said.
A long time ago, Mr. Adams said that strict rules should be taken to stop guns from coming from the South into cities like New York and other northern cities like Washington, D.C. He said that on Thursday, he would talk about the issue at a meeting of American mayors in Washington, D.C.
This happened about 18 months after a toddler named Davell Gardner was killed by a bullet at a cookout in Brooklyn, New York.
Late Wednesday, Betsy Abril, 32, leaned against the brick wall of an apartment building that looked out over the shooting. He asked her if she lived half a block away and had three kids of her own, including a 3-month-old daughter. She said she did. The shooting, she said, made her think twice about letting her son go to the store alone for snacks.
It was “heartbreaking” for Ms. Abril, a mother, to see this, she said. This neighborhood is getting out of hand. There are so many things going on. It wasn’t this way before.
John Thomson came up with a different way of looking at things.
People who were near the shooting site on Wednesday nite said that Mr. Thomson had grown up in the area and that he still went there a few times a year.
It’s not a big surprise to me, but you don’t usually see things that big. He pointed to the block between Valentine Avenue and the Grand Concourse, where police cars and yellow tape had been placed.
This is what 34-year-old Mr. Thomson said: “I’ve seen people drive by and point guns at each other, so I’ve seen things in this neighborhood.” Because of Mr. Adams’ promise to make the city safer, he told him about it. But, he didn’t think things would get better soon.
As long as there were “bad people, with bad intentions,” he said, there would always be “bad people.”
