The baby was in a car with her mother in the Bronx when she was shot in the latest act of gun violence that has shocked many in New York City.
An 11-month-old girl was in critical condition late Wednesday after being hit in the face by a stray bullet while sitting in a parked car with her mother in the Bronx, the police said.
After initially being taken to St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, the girl, whose first birthday is on Friday, was moved to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, the police said.
The girl and her mother were in a car parked near the intersection of Valentine Avenue and East 198th Street at around 6:45 p.m. when at least one man started shooting at another, the police said. Both men ran off, no one was in custody, and the investigation was continuing, the police said.
The shooting was the latest in a series of violent occurrences that have put New Yorkers on edge while testing Mayor Eric Adams’s vow to improve public safety after increases in some crimes during the pandemic. Shootings in particular have surged in some parts of the city.
A spokesman for Mr. Adams said the mayor was at the hospital being briefed on the shooting. Police officials had scheduled a news conference for later in the evening.
Over the weekend, a 40-year-old woman was killed when she was shoved into the path of a subway train at a Times Square station. The police said a homeless man who was once deemed too mentally ill to stand trial on drug-related charges had confessed to the killing.
About a week earlier, a 19-year-old woman was shot and killed by a man who was robbing a Burger King in East Harlem, the police said. On New Year’s Day, an off-duty police officer was shot in the head while sleeping in a car between shifts outside an East Harlem station house.
The shooting of the baby on Wednesday came the night after, and about a mile from, an incident in the Bronx in which a police officer was shot while scuffling with a person who the police said had a gun. It also came about 18 months after a toddler named Davell Gardner was fatally struck by a bullet when gunmen attacked a nighttime cookout in Brooklyn.
