Rio baby hit by bullet 15th child shot this year

RIO DE JANEIRO: A baby was wounded by a stray bullet in Rio de Janeiro while in his mother’s arms, becoming the 15th child shot here this year, reports said Tuesday. The non-governmental organization Fogo Cruzado, which monitors the city’s daily shootings, said the boy was hit Monday in the courtyard of a school in the historic Cosme Velho neighborhood of posh southern Rio. The infant’s mother had come to the private Sao Vicente de Paulo school to pick up another child.

The school said it was “brutally put on Rio’s map of violence when a stray bullet hit a baby while in his mother’s arms, while she waited for her other child to finish a sports activity”. G1 news site said the baby was struck in the shoulder and that doctors were to operate to remove the bullet. This was the 15th shooting of a child in the greater Rio area in 2018, said Fogo Cruzado, which translates as Cross Fire. These include a three-year-old girl shot dead in her parents’ car in February, an 11-year-old girl hit by a stray bullet while at school, and several children shot during confrontations between police and drug gangs. Four of the 15 were killed, Fogo Cruzado said.

Parents and others in the neighborhood of Sao Vicente de Paulo expressed dismay, saying the shooting proved nowhere is safe in Rio, even if the vast majority of the violence is in the poor, gang-infested neighborhoods known as favelas. “It’s worrying because when you’re in a school you think you’re safe, but then things happen on the outside,” said Jassira, 60, who has a grandchild at Sao Vicente de Paulo. “Today you can be in the most expensive neighborhood of Rio and witness a shooting or stray bullets.