Celebratory gunfire leads to injury

Boy hit by bullet after weapons are fired on July 4

As Gabriel Cartwright held up his tablet to record fireworks in the Tuesday night sky, the 7-year-old felt a pain in his left wrist.

“When I think the bullet came down, my hand came down and then it started to hurt,” Gabriel said. “There was blood on the porch. It felt like it is burning.”

At first, Gabriel and his grandmother, Darlene Staugh and a family friend all thought he’d been hit by fireworks.

It turned out that a bullet had forced its way beneath the child’s skin.

The women called his mother Brianne Staugh, 32, back to the family’s Fort Lauderdale home in the 700 block of Alabama Avenue from her server job at Waxy O’Connor’s pub on Southeast 17th Street.

“It just squirted blood,” she said they told her about Gabriel’s wound.

As she drove to meet them at Plantation General Hospital, they told her the bleeding had lessened. A nurse thought Gabriel had fallen and broken his wrist, Staugh said. But an X-ray proved otherwise.

“Sure enough, it’s right there, plain as day,” Staugh said about the bullet. “God only knows where it came from.”

As every major holiday approaches, South Florida police departments warn residents not to fire weapons into the air because sometimes those bullets come down on innocent people.

Also Tuesday night, about 36 miles north in Boynton Beach, a family’s home in the 3000 block of Grove Road was struck by gunfire.

Bullets hit a wooden fence, a gutter and a patio door, a police report said. A bullet also landed on the dining room floor, property damage that cost the family $335 and an

AMY BETH BENNETT/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Brianne Staugh discusses how her son, Gabriel Cartwright, 7, was shot on the Fourth of July in Fort Lauderdale. “God only knows where it came from,” she said of the bullet.