Bystander survives gunshot in street fight
A BROOKLYN mother narrowly escaped death after a fight between neighbors sent a stray bullet flying through her chest.
Katiuska Cabrera was sitting on the stoop of her Belmont Ave. building in East New York about 9:30 p.m. Thursday when a shot tore through her left arm, into one of her breasts and out the other side.
“Had it been a bigger bullet, it would’ve killed me,” she told the Daily News, explaining the gunshot was just inches away from her heart. “I was panicking.”
The 30-year-old mom said the mayhem started with a brawl between a neighbor’s 17-year-old son and another unnamed teen in front of the building next door.
As the fight turned one-sided, her neighbor emerged to defend her overpowered child. Cabrera said the woman made a phone call, and two men in their 30s showed up to join the melee.
During the fray, the teen antagonist promised the neighbor that the beef with her son wasn’t over.
“‘Every time I see your son, it’s lit, we’re going to fight.’ So she (the neighbor) said, ‘Word? That’s how you feel? Say no more,’ ” recalled Cabrera. “She grabbed her son, went upstairs for five minutes and then came downstairs .”
People started running from the escalating scuffle and then one of the woman’s older allies pulled a gun, Cabrera said.
“(He) yelled out, ‘Yo, Bro, move!’ Then he started shooting and he busted me,” Cabrera said. “He was going to shoot again, but the gun got jammed.”
Cabrera twisted her body to the right away from the gunfire. The bullet pierced her left forearm before hitting her left breast, passing through her chest and exiting from her right side.
“I ran upstairs screaming for help. Nobody thought that I got shot because I wasn’t bleeding. But when I hugged my children’s godmother, she touched the blood,” she said.
“I started shaking and sweating a lot. She cut my shirt and my other friend pulled up my bra. When he saw the blood he was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”
One of Cabrera’s relatives called 911. Medics brought her to Brookdal e University Hospital, where doctors discovered the blast had broken her sternum, she said.
Cabrera was discharged from the hospital Saturday, just hours before speaking with a News reporter.
She was still having difficulty breathing and had to hunch over while walking, but said she felt grateful that the bullet didn’t take her away from her three children.
“I’m just in a little bit of pain,” she said. “I was scared to die. I’m so lucky.”
Cabrera said the gunman was a burly man with dreadlocks who was wearing a yellow shirt, and his buddy was chubby with a hat on and a red shirt. She had heard the pair were from nearby Brownsville.
Cops recovered a 9-mm. shell casing and another live round at the scene, police sources said. They also found a .380-caliber handgun behind the building, sources said.
There have been no arrests, authorities said.
Cabrera said she is furious at her neighbor for turning a fight between kids into a deadly situation.
“You could’ve called them to come get the kid. But to come and start shooting? It was uncalled for. Imagine if there were other kids out here.”
She said that the neighbor ignored her as medics brought her into a waiting ambulance on the night of the shooting.
“I saw her pass by. She didn’t even look at me, she just went straight upstairs.”