Wearing an oxygen mask and with his eyes closed, there's an innocence still on his face juxtaposed to the violence that put him in this bed at the pediatric ICU unit at Jacobi Hospital.
"He wasn't really screaming or anything like that. Just when we applied some pressure to his wound, that's when he was saying ouch," deli owner Mahmood Abdulrub said.
That moment of violence was caught on surveillance video. The child is standing in a doorway, is shot grabs his left arm and stumbles out frame.
He was at Papa Yala's Deli in the /*Soundview*/ section of the Bronx around 8 o'clock Tuesday night, when investigators say a gunman riding a bicycle fired a single shot into the bodega.
"We just heard a random shot. People started running. His mom called him to the back. He was holding his shoulder that's when you could see he was shot," Abdulrub said.
The store clerk says the boy's mother began screaming as her son began coughing up blood. He apologized for getting blood on the floor. Then he tried to calm his mother, saying, "I'm okay, mommy."
Then he asked why his mother was crying.
"You're shot,'" she said. "That's why I'm crying."
The boy said he was okay, but he wasn't. Doctors are treating him for a punctured lung, a fractured rib and an injured spinal cord. He still has the bullet inside of him, and he won't be heading home anytime soon. He reportedly told his mother that he's scared to go outside.
While the NYPD searches for a suspect, police commissioner Ray Kelly wrote about the shooting in an editorial about the city's crusade to get illegal guns off the street.
"An examination of shootings last year showed that 94% of all shooting victims in the city were black or Hispanic, often targeted by other youths, or accidentally shot as bystanders like the little boy in Soundview," he wrote.
A $12,000 reward has been offered for information leading to an arrest.
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