An 11-year-old girl became the latest victim of a stray bullet on Monday after she was hit in the stomach by a gunman riding on the back of a scooter through the Bronx.
The girl, identified as Kyhara Tay, was just an innocent bystander half a block away when two men drove past on a moped and opened fire at around 5 p.m.
Their target was another man they were chasing near Westchester Avenue and Fox Street in the Bronx’s Foxhurst neighborhood, Police said.
Young Kyhara was standing at a nearby nail station with a friend, the police said, when she was shot in the stomach.
After being hit, witnesses saw the 11-year-old walk into the salon – New Kim Nails – where she then passed out. She was rushed to Lincoln Hospital in a critical condition, where she later died from her wounds.
Police officers have released footage from a surveillance camera that captured the shooting and the two men they are currently searching for.
The video shows the two men riding on the moped down the sidewalk, with the passenger pointing a firearm at his target and opening fire.
NYPD officers said the two suspects were chasing a man towards 165th Street, who then attempted to enter 1015 Fox Street, causing the scooter to drive past him.
Police said the man then began running in the opposite direction, at which point the passenger on the scooter opened fire at him.
However, the reckless gunfire missed the man and instead hit the girl in the abdomen around half a block away.
Two witnesses – Lillian Johnson and Maya Jones – were getting their nails done in the salon when they heard yelling from outside and gunshots.
At that point, they told ABC7NY the 11-year-old Kyhara burst into the nail salon, ‘holding her stomach,’ clearly in pain.
‘She got shot and then she came into the store… like she was trying to get away from the gunshots,’ Johnson said. ‘She was holding her stomach saying, ‘Ow!”
‘We didn’t know where [the blood] was, we didn’t know if it was like her leg or her chest until we zipped down and we saw the wound, the wound on her stomach,’ Jones said. ‘And then she ended up passing out on the floor.’
They said that Jones applied pressure to the girl’s wound before she passed out. Jones described how she was ‘turning blue’ from the blood loss.
The girl was taken to Lincoln Medical Center, roughly two miles away from the shooting, where she was pronounced dead.
‘She’s 11, kid’s got a future and stuff like that it makes no sense to me,’ Jones said. ‘It’s traumatizing cause it could be anyone.’
Kyhara is the latest victim of gun violence in New York City. In recent months, several young people have been shot – either intentionally or accidentally.
‘This is very difficult for us to accept,’ Deputy Chief Timothy McCormack said at a press briefing following the shooting. ‘This is the second child that’s shot in this borough this year – an 11-month-old and now an 11-year-old.’
He said that finding the suspects would be time consuming, but that his department would track the gun down, ‘and we will chase the scooter as far as it goes.’
In the case of the 11-month-old referenced by McCormack, the baby was struck by a stray bullet in the left cheek while sitting in a parked car with her mother on January 19. The baby underwent brain surgery that same month.
Three hours before the 11-year-old was shot on Monday, two teenage boys were struck by bullets in Brooklyn, and last Wednesday, a 17-year-old son of a NYPD police officer was struck by a bullet in the arm across from his High School in Queens.
Police said he was not the intended target of the shooting.
At the end of April, 14-year-old Kaitlyn Lau – also in Queens – was hit in the neck by a stray bullet, police said. Lau survived, but it was later reported she could be paralyzed as a result of her injuries.
Stray bullets have killed several people in the United States in recent months.
In October 2021, a young mother-of-two from suburban Chicago was reading the Bible to her baby daughter at bedtime when she was killed by a stray bullet that flew into the house and struck the woman in the head.
Lam Calderon said her daughter, 23-year-old Melanie Yates, and her husband, Daniel, were separately getting their daughters ready for bed when a loud bang went off near their home.
Calderon said her son-in-law called out to Yates, asking her whether she heard what to him sounded like loud fireworks, but she did not respond.
In December, a 14-year-old girl was killed by a stray bullet in a Burlington dress room.
The teen, Valentina Orellana Peralta was shopping for a quinceañera dress with her mother at the store in North Hollywood when she was struck by a stray bullet by an unidentified Los Angeles cop. The Los Angeles Medical Examiner’s Office ruled her death a homicide from the gunshot wound to the chest.
In January this year, a six-month-old baby was fatally shot after he was caught in crossfire while sitting in the back of his mother’s car in Atlanta.
Grayson Matthew was riding in the car near a convenience store and a school when his mother came across a gunfight between two people in nearby cars.
She said a bullet traveled into the back of her car and hit the baby.
Days later, a little girl who had recently emigrated to US from Mexico was killed in a gang-related shooting while walking down the street near her Chicago home.
Melissa Ortega, whose family moved to Chicago from Mexico in August 2021, was killed when she was hit in the head by a stray bullet during a shooting that targeted a 26-year-old gang member. The alleged shooter was dropped off by a vehicle before getting out of the car, when he began firing.
In April, the mother of a Puerto Rican Olympian was killed by a stray bullet to the head while sewing in her Connecticut home.
Police believe Mabel Martinez, 56 was an innocent bystander and the intended target was a man walking outside her home in the town of Waterbury on Saturday afternoon. She died from her injuries on Sunday.
The victim’s daughter Yarimar Mercado Martinez, 27, a rifle shooter on the Puerto Rico Olympic team, competed in the summer Olympics in Tokyo last year and in Rio de Janeiro 2016.
In Monday’s case, Police have asked the public to help them identify the shooters, and urged anyone with information to contact Crime Stoppers.
Call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). Alternatively, submit tips by visiting the CrimeStoppers website at crimestoppers.nypdonline.org or by messaging on Twitter @NYPDTips.