"This person took my daughter's life away, just like that," said Maritza Pacheco, the victim's mother.
Maritza Pacheco's heart isn't just breaking, it's twisting, crushing, and shredding, at the thought of what someone did to her baby.
"He didn't kill a dog in the street he killed a human being. She was full of light, only 24 years old," Pacheco said.
Only 24 years old, the mother of a beautiful three year old girl, Yaritza Pacheco was out getting a sandwich with a friend after work around 4 Sunday morning when the gunfire rang out along E. 174th Street in the Bronx.
The shots that echoed in the nearby stores just blocks from where she grew up injured a man.
Police sources says the suspect, Jeffry Ramirez, his girlfriend and the male shooting victim were in line at a nearby bodega, when there was an argument between the male shooting victim and the suspect's girlfriend which ended in the male shooting victim pushing the suspect's girlfriend.
The suspect and his girlfriend left the store, but then he allegedly came back and started firing at the male shooting victim on the street.
The bullet that hit Yaritza in the neck was a stray.
"She told her friend Mary, 'I got shot', she said, 'but where' and she went like that and the blood came out," Pacheco said.
It is an image that is creating a fury, and is not softened by news that police have 19-year-old Ramirez in custody.
Nothing can take out the sting of a bullet that left a three-year-old motherless, and in doing so pierced straight through this woman's soul.
"He's lucky he's still alive and his mother can go to jail to see him, but I have to go to the cemetery every Sunday to see my daughter he took her away from me," Pacheco said.
The other victim is hospitalized in stable condition.
Ramirez is charged with murder, manslaughter, and criminal possession of a weapon.
