New York 8-year-old shot on Halloween while trick-or-treating with family, father shot while pushing girl away
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: A happy Halloween day ended on a tragic note for a New York City family as their eight-year-old daughter was hit by a bullet. The unnamed girl was out while trick-or-treating with her father and younger sister when she was shot in the leg in Harlem on Saturday evening, October 31.
Footage obtained by The New York post showed the victim walking on Lenox Avenue between West 117th Street and West 118th Street when suddenly people on the road began to disperse and the father of the girls was seen pushing the younger one out of the way while the elder one fell to the ground. The father told The Post that he along with his daughters was going to meet the mother of the girls at a CVS on the corner when he saw a man taking out his gun. “I hear shots. I pushed my youngest out of the way and then grab her but she’s yelling, ‘My leg!'” he said.
The 39-year-old father, who was also reportedly hit by a bullet in his arm, rushed to get a cab to the hospital. However, it was not immediately clear how many operations the little girl will need to fully recover. "On Halloween, a kid trick-or-treating can’t be safe in New York? How crazy is that? Halloween didn’t seem to be in the cards this year but the kids begged me to go trick-and-treating," he added as reported by The Sun. The firing also hurt a third victim in the arm, but it has been said that he is expected to survive. Meanwhile, police said that a fight broke out between two men in their 20's which eventually escalated, resulting in the shooting. All three victims accidentally became a part of the shooting.
In another incident, a 15-year-old girl was shot by mistake in her stomach by her stepfather. The incident reportedly took place over the weekend when the teenager returned home at 2:15 am. On the night of the incident, she earlier went to her friend’s house but returned home in the early hours. As the victim was opening the garage door to her parents’ home, they mistook her for an intruder. The father took his fire-arm as a safety measure and shot the girl thinking she was an intruder in the stomach. Soon after the blunder, the victim was rushed to the hospital, where she is receiving treatment. Reports said her condition was not fine.
An accidental case of shooting also happened in Chihuahua, Mexico, in October when a 20-year-old died while shooting a video for TikTok. Areline Martinez faked her own abduction but her friends who were reportedly playing their part in the video accidentally shot her to death. The woman was blindfolded and her hands were tied when she was struck by the bullet. Chihuahua state attorney general, Cesar Augusto Peniche Espejel, said, “One of the hypotheses we are looking at is that they [the youths] were tampering with a firearm thinking that it was not loaded and accidentally shot the woman."