Police cars now line the 600 block of North Ellwood Avenue where gunshots rang out Tuesday afternoon.
“It could have been my child. It could have been somebody else's child,” said one of the victim’s neighbors who did not wish to be identified out of fear for her safety.
But this time a bullet found Francsola Rice's three-year-old son, Darrell Johns, as they waited for a cab on their front porch.
“He was actually grazed twice with a big gun,” said Rice, “Four or five (shots) or whatever and it went across his chest where his heart is and swiped through the side of his arm and then it hit him again from the outside straight across.”
Rice says she had stepped back inside their rowhouse to grab her cell phone when the shooting occurred, and a 38-year-old man who caught a bullet in his leg ran into their home to seek cover leaving her injured child behind.
Doctors have treated Darrell's physical injuries, and he's since been released from the hospital, but his mental scars remain.
“I'm very devastated that my three-year-old had to experience this,” said Rice, “He's like, 'Oh no, Mom. I don't want to go back there. They're going to hurt my other arm.'"
This shooting comes on the heels of yet another one, which injured five-year-old Amy Hayes in West Baltimore last week—-the same young girl who lost her seven-year-old sister in a shooting over the summer.
Rice says it's yet further evidence that the unwritten laws of Baltimore's mean streets no longer apply.
“There was a rule. Kids and old people and women never were supposed to get hurt,” said Rice, “Now, these @#$%&!! are just loose. They've gone off on this stuff or whatever they're doing and it's messing everybody up and it's unfair to these babies that didn't even get to live.”
If you have any information, which could help lead police to the shooter, you can call Metro Crime Stoppers at 1-866-7-LOCKUP.
