A 5-year-old girl left critically injured when she was hit by gunfire while in the family car near a vigil for a Bronx shooting victim has improved, her parents told The Post.
“She’s better,” the girl’s father said outside Montefiore Children’s Hospital, after grabbing a bundle of balloons for the child, including one that read “Get Well Soon.”
“She’s stable,” said the mom.
Neither of the parents wanted to be identified by name and declined to talk in detail about what happened.
“It was stupid,” the father said of the shooting, before walking away.
The bullets flew as friends and family of a man shot and killed Thursday near East 214th Street and Holland Avenue were about to release their own balloons in his memory at the same spot a day later.
The witnesses said the bullets that struck the girl were fired from a passing car.
But police said the shots were fired by those in the crowd, and were aimed at two vehicles driving by after one of the vehicles backfired, a sound that was possibly mistaken for gunfire.
The girl was in one of the cars they fired at, police said.
“At first we thought the car backfired,” said a woman who was at the vigil to honor her dead boyfriend and declined to give her name.
“I turned around and looked, I saw a flashing and I ducked,” she said.
“Everybody was ducking and running and screaming. It was supposed to be a balloon release for my child’s father.”
The vigil was being held for Justin Rodriguez, who was killed when he was shot in the chest and shoulder about a block away at East 213th Street and Holland Avenue on Thursday, police said.
There have been no arrests in either case, cops said.
“I have no idea what this was all about,” Rodriguez’s girlfriend said, sitting in front of the candles set up for him.
“I don’t know who was in the car. All I saw was a duct-taped window. It happened so fast.”
Meanwhile, her daughter keeps asking for Rodriguez.
“She is autistic,” the mom said.
“She keeps on saying, ‘Papi, Papi, Dada, Dada.’”
Another woman who was at the vigil said her own 3-year-old daughter sadly “knew what to do” when the bullets rang out.
“I grabbed my daughter,” said the weeping woman, who also declined to give her name out of fear.
“She hit the ground. She knew what to do.”
She said she saw the car driving by as the shots flew.
“They were going along slowly and it sped up,” she said. “All the time they were shooting.”
She said the experience had convinced her to move away.
“That’s it,” she said.
“I’m over it. My three year-old had to experience this….dropping to the ground. She did it on her own.”
A 60-year-old DJ who was at the vigil but had just left when the bullets flew said it’s “a shame we got to go through this in the neighborhood.”
“I wish they’d hurry up and beef up the police,” he said.
“It’s getting from bad to worse out here.”
He has granddaughters around the same age as the child who was shot.
“The neighborhood was better but now it’s like you got the gangs, you got the drugs, you got the people shooting around,” he said.
“It’s just crazy out here.”
Another neighbor said he was inside his apartment when he heard five or six shots and immediately thought of his daughters, who were at a nearby store.
“I called them,” he said.
“I said, ‘Stay I’m coming to pick you up.’”
He had seen the child in the car before the shooting.
“When I saw her she was sitting in the back of the car drinking her juice,” he said.
“The parents were standing outside. It is sad.”
