‘I DON’T WANT TO DIE’
Mom shot in Times Square: No one would even help me
Wendy Magrinat, who came to New York from Rhode Island to celebrate Mother’s Day with her 2-year-old, yesterday relived the nightmare of being shot in Times Square the evening before.
“‘I don’t want to die!’ I was screaming. ‘Please help me!’ — and people were just recording, they weren’t helping,’’ she told The Post.
A young mom says she came to the Big Apple to celebrate Mother’s Day, only to end up shot, bleeding and begging for her life in Times Square — as callous bystanders simply recorded her on their cellphones.
Wendy Magrinat, 23, of Rhode Island, was one of three innocent bystanders wounded in Saturday’s shocking bloodshed at the Crossroads of the World.
“I felt really dizzy, and I was losing blood, and I just started screaming, ‘I got shot! I got shot! I don’ t want to die !” the tourist, who took a bullet to the right thigh, told The Post on Sunday.
“‘I have a 2-year-old, please get my daughter to safety! I have a 2-year-old, I don’t wanna die!’ I was screaming . . . ‘Please help me!’ — and people were just recording, they weren’t helping,’’ Magrinat said.
The young mom was in Manhattan with her mother, sister and other family members, including her little girl, to celebrate Mother’s Day when a nearby street dispute involving an illegal CD vendor turned violent just before 5 p.m.
Two other bystanders were wounded: a 4-year-old girl from Brooklyn and a 43-year-old woman from Passaic, NJ.
The aunt of shot tot Skye Martinez told The Post on Sunday how the family was halfway down the street after the shooting before they realized the little one had been hit in her left leg.
“Even when we noticed, when we were at the corner, she wasn’t crying,” Danae Romero, 16, said of her niece. “She’s pretty tough, I guess.”
The child was raced to an ambulance by a cop captured on video surveillance running along Broadway with the bleeding girl in her arms.
Romero said Skye is still at the hospital, where she is in “stable condition.” The child won’t undergo surgery because the bullet “didn’t hit any important bone. It just entered and exited,” she said.
The aunt said she would ask the shooter, “Why?”
“Why there?’’ Romero said, referring to Times Square. “How could you? There are just so many people there! Do you not care about any other people?’’
The teen then pleaded to cops, “Please actually catch him.”
“What if he ends up hurting some more people?” she said. “’Cause if he’s able to do it in a place where there’s so much people like Times Square and not care, what’s going to stop him from doing it again?”
Police have launched a manhunt for suspected shooter Farrakhan Muhammad, 31 — whose brother told cops his sibling was aiming for him when he fired, law-enforcement sources told The Post on Sunday.
Both the wounded girl’s family and Magrinat’s had been waiting to get into the Line Friends toy store on Broadway when they were shot.
The third victim, Marcela Aldana, of New Jersey, was hit in the left foot during the violence, law-enforcement sources have said.
Magrinat recalled that there had been a fight between at least two men, one of whom was standing “practically next to me” right before wild gunfire rang out.
“Everything was so fast, but the shooting started — and the first shot went to my leg,” she recalled.
“I just covered it and ran a little, just to get my daughter and my family to safety — but I couldn’t. The pain was too much, and I dropped to the floor.
“All I kept thinking was, I have a 2-year-old child — it could have been her, or it was possible I’d never get to see her again.”
Magrinat said she screamed for help, to no avail.
“I understand . . . people get in shock. But if you’re in shock, you shouldn’t be recording. But that’s how people are right now,” the distressed mother said.
The only ones who helped her were the “amazing” NYPD officers, she added.
At the hospital, surgeons decided against removing the bullet lodged in her thigh, fearing it would worsen the damage, Magrinat shared.
“So I live with a bullet in my leg,” she said. “The pain is always there, you just have to hold it and hope it gets better.
“Thankfully, I was really lucky that it didn’t hit any arteries or the bone or the muscle,” she said.
As for her family, it will be a long time before they even think about returning to the Big Apple.
“My mother was also completely traumatized,” she said. “It was a traumatic experience, and I think until the gun violence is a little controlled, it’s going to be a long time before I go back to New York.”