A 16-year-old girl hanging out with her friends after school who was sitting on a park swing when the bullet struck.
A grandmother walking home from her afternoon grocery shopping who looked down and saw blood on her leg.
A retired cop, 60, heading to his job with child protective child services, when he found himself in the middle of a gang shooting.
These were just some of the at least eight innocent bystanders hit by stray bullets in the past month alone as a wave of gun violence grips New York City.
Out-of-control criminals have been leaving a bloody trail of innocent victims in the Big Apple, the most recent being a 14-year-old boy who was shot in the leg outside his Staten Island high school on Tuesday. Police on Wednesday released surveillance footage of five men wanted for questioning in connection to the shooting, including the apparent triggerman.
On Monday, a 70-year-old woman and a pregnant teenager joined the grim list when they were hit in separate shootings just hours apart. Both women survived.
“It’s even more crazy, because this has been happening in New York City back-to-back,” said Jolaine Marrero, whose pregnant 19-year-old friend was hit by a stray bullet while sitting in a car in Washington Heights at around 9 p.m.
“It wasn’t something so crazy to even picture us New Yorkers hearing stuff like this,” Marrero told The Post. “It’s like we are accustomed to s–t like this happening. It’s really sad New York has to change. A city we once loved is turning into a city we now fear.”
Marilyn Hunte, the 70-year-old Brooklyn grandmother shot in the leg while walking home from the grocery store at around 2 p.m., said she worried that New Yorkers are living in “some scary times.”
“There’s just too many guns out there and people with anger issues — mental problems and anger issues,” said Hunte, a retired 8th-grade school teacher. “It’s scary.”
“Things are getting out of control,” she said. “I like the mayor, I voted for him, but he has a big job on his hands. He’s going to need help to fix it. I pray that he can.”
Hunte on Wednesday showed a Post reporter a photo of the two bloodstained $20 she had in her pocket when the bullet struck, having just gotten them when she used her debit card at a Foodtown in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
“That money was in my pants pocket that day,” she said. “That’s my blood on it.”
The tough-as-nails granny realized she’d been hit when she “heard the gunshot sound and felt a slap to the side of my leg” — leaving her in shock.
“I touched it and saw the blood. That was confirmation,” she said, adding that, “I didn’t fall” when the bullet struck her.
“I thought of where the bullet hit me — had that been a child, the child would’ve been dead,” she said.
Her cousin, Laurice Johnson, told The Post she missed the days when street thugs would settle disputes with their fists — instead of their firearms.
“Don’t pick up guns, especially when you obviously don’t know how to use it,” said Johnson, who is also 70. “Why can’t you just duke it out like they did back in the day?
“You went to blows, best man won,” she said. “Just duke it out … You ain’t killing nobody and you’re certainly not killing no stranger.”
All eight bystanders shot over the last month escaped with their lives, though will likely have lasting scars.
They included a retired NYPD detective, Terence Felder, who took a bullet to the stomach in Harlem at around 7 a.m. on Oct. 4, and a 40-year-old off-duty corrections officer grazed while driving along the Cross Island Parkway in Queens on Oct. 15.
On Oct. 2 — in the month’s first stray-shot shooting — a 35-year-old woman was sitting inside a Royal Fried Chicken restaurant in Brownsville when a bullet from a gunfight outside pierced through the eatery and hit her wrist.
Late last month, four teenagers, including 15-year-old April Castaneda and a 16-year-old boy, were hit stray slugs at the London Planetree Playground in Queens.
April’s brother, Kevin Castaneda, 26, told The Post at the time that his sister was a “tough little kid” — but that he couldn’t believe what had happened to her.
“I can’t wrap my head around it because it’s my little sister and I’m supposed to protect her,” he said.
Nadine Sobers, whose teen daughter, Kyla, 16, was shot in the head and wounded in a separate park shooting in Brooklyn on Sept. 30, called the rampant gunplay “repugnant.”
“It left a bad taste in my mouth,” the worried mom said Tuesday. “It’s not safe. As a parent looking in, it’s out of control. I don’t know if they don’t care about going to jail or they don’t care about the next life.
“They are destroying families,” she said. “Something has to be done. You call for more gun control but what is it if you write it on a piece of paper and that’s it? What are our governor, our mayor, politicians doing? It makes me feel angry.”
Some of the stray bullet shootings have had deadly consequences. In May, 11-year-old Kyhara Tay was mortally wounded while standing on a Bronx street. Witnesses said the young girl stumbled into a nail salon bleeding and clutching her stomach before she passed out.
“To me, it’s like nothing is going to change,” the girl’s heartbroken dad, Sokpini Tay, said Tuesday.
“Young kids are dying,” he said. “They are dying just going outside to go play or go to the store. Not just me, but everybody would like to see something done.”
The grieving man added, “I’m not hopeful.”
“I wish this would never happen to anybody,” he said. “I haven’t stopped crying. Some days are okay. Some days are really hard.”
The NYPD says it does not track stray-bullet shootings separately from the overall gun violence that is plaguing the five boroughs.
Police stats show that, overall, shootings in the city are down so far this year compared to the same period last year, with 1,105 incidents this year compared to 1,294 this year.
But the number of shootings citywide has spiked more than 68% over the past five years, the statistics show — and bystanders have been in the line of fire in recent weeks.
“These shootings tell you all you need to know about New York City right now — no one is safe from the indiscriminate gun violence or the lack of consequences that drive it,” one police officer told The Post.
“You have no right to feel safe in this city,” he said.
Another veteran city cop agreed.
“The criminals don’t have good aim,” he said. “They’re not trained shooters and when you fire a gun and you don’t know how to use it efficiently, this is what happens.
“People get shot and then the criminals don’t care who they shoot as long as they think they’re shooting at the target,” he said.
Additional reporting by Joe Marino and Tina Moore
