HIT WITH STRAY BULLET ON WAY TO STORE WITH SON Teen said to be target also hit in B’klyn daylight shoot
A Brooklyn woman on her way to search for groceries during the coronavirus outbreak with her young son in tow was struck in the leg by a stray bullet, the Daily News has learned.
“I’m in a lot of pain and I feel really sick,” the distraught victim, 27-year-old Nikki Nicholson, told the Daily News from her hospital bed. “It’s innocent people getting hurt. It’s sad.”
Nicholson, 27, was blasted in the right thigh near N. Oxford Walk and Park Ave. in Clinton Hill about 3:10 p.m. Sunday, sending her 8-year-old son running in terror.
“My baby started running, and I started running,” Nicholson said. “As soon as I started running, I fell. My foot just felt really crazy.
Like, I can’t explain how it felt.”
A 17-year-old boy standing near Nicholson also took a bullet to the leg. The teen, who has an arrest record, was likely the intended target, sources said. He is recovering at a local hospital.
No arrests have been made.
Nicholson’s brave son, after initially running away, dashed back to his mom’s side. “He said he didn’t want me to die,” Nicholson recalled, fighting back tears.
“It’s scary.”
With visitors nearly completely banned from city hospitals due to the coronavirus outbreak, Nicholson, a liberal arts student in her final semester at Manhattan Community College, has been all alone since her brush with death.
“They’re trying to get me to do therapy because they want me to get out of the hospital because of the coronavirus,” Nicholson said. “They were trying to get me to exercise my foot a little bit, but I was about to pass out.”
She said that her doctors at New York Methodist Hospital have been “amazing.”
In a Facebook Live video mere hours after emergency surgery, she warned her concerned friends to be vigilant.
“You guys have to be careful out there,” she said. “People are evil. I don’t know who shoots people at 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon.”
“If I would have ran in a different direction then my baby would have got shot because he was literally right in front of me,” she added tearfully.
Nicholson now has a plate in her leg and her toes have been numb since the shooting.
“I’m not angry,” she told the Daily News. “I’m just happy that it wasn’t my life. It could have been worse. And my son is OK, so it’s all right. I’m gonna be OK.”