It could have been worse, but for a Brooklyn woman struck by a stray bullet while on her way out to shop for groceries, it was bad enough.
“I heard the shot and felt it,” said Vivette Morris, 65, who was shot in the buttocks on July 13 as she pushed a shopping cart outside her home in East Flatbush. “I thank God it didn’t hit me in the head and kill me.”
Morris, who lives in the Flatbush Gardens housing complex, was on her way to a Nostrand Ave. meat market to pick up something for Sunday dinner when shots suddenly rang out around 10 a.m. near Foster and Brooklyn Aves.
Cops said the shooter fled in a black BMW east on Foster Ave. No arrests have been made.
The victim was an unintended target, police said. Cops recovered 10 shell casings from the scene as they investigated the shooting.
“I heard multiple shots, and I was trying to get out of the way — and when I got hit I still heard shots firing,” Morris said. “There were kids in the courtyard. The kids don’t know what’s going on. The government has to look into it.”
Medics rushed Morris from the scene to Kings County Hospital. Doctors there told her the bullet cracked a bone and she will need to use a walker to get around.
Doctors haven’t taken out the bullet and are expecting it to eventually come out on its own, Morris said.
“God was covering that lady,” said a neighbor who came to Morris’ aid after the shooting. “She had a shopping cart. She was going to the store, just going on about her business, and then that happens.”
“I went over there to help her,” the neighbor said. “It seemed like the bullet ricocheted off her. She was crying and me and this other man tried helping her up. I told her she’s going to be fine, there’s no blood. But I can’t imagine the mental pain that woman was in.”
Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News
Police investigate after Vivette Morris, 65, was shot as she pushed a shopping cart outside her home in East Flatbush. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News)
That same day in Queens, a frightened mother woke up to find that a stray bullet had whizzed through her Jamaica home.
The 68-year-old woman said the shot, meant for somebody else, shattered the first-floor window of the two-family house where she lives with her son.
”I’m scared, and I’m worried,” said the mom, who noted that her son was up and about around 2 a.m. when the bullet penetrated the window and a couple walls.
“It’s very bizarre,” she said. “It could have been a direct hit to my son. My son may not have been alive today. I don’t know, I don’t have any enemies. I don’t know where this would come from.”
After the bullet came through the window, it traveled about 20 feet and pierced two walls.
Obtained by Daily News
Bullet holes are seen in the window frame and wall of a 68-year-old Queens woman’s home in Queens. (Obtained by Daily News)
“I saw a hole going through my wall,” she said. “Between the wall in my place and bedroom there is a staircase that goes upstairs. I went upstairs to see what was there, then I saw the exit part of the hole and another entrance of the hole going into the bedroom.”
“When my son — he goes to bed late — was in the kitchen at the time, he said he heard two bangs,” she said. “He did duck down. He said when he heard the shots that it was close and it drew his attention but he didn’t look through the window to see what was there.”
Nearly 24 hours earlier, Dwayne Belfield was fatally shot in the chest near Liverpool St. near Glassboro Ave. in South Jamaica.
Video obtained by ABC Channel 7 Eyewitness News showed a dark-colored BMW slow down at the intersection as the killer unleashes a hail of bullets from the back seat before the luxury car speeds off. Belfield ran several feet before collapsing on the sidewalk about 8:15 a.m. July 12.
It was unclear if that slaying is connected to the Brooklyn stray-bullet shooting, but both shooters escaped in a dark-colored BMW.
On April 29, 17-year-old Coney Island teen Tamari Carmona was fatally shot in the head at the Flatbush Gardens complex and died a week later.
In that tragic death, three men dressed in black confronted Carmona and one of them pulled out a pistol and opened fire, striking Carmona in the head before all three ran off toward New York Ave.
“He was pretty much brain-dead the whole time,” Tamari’s cousin Kaliyah Serrano, 21, said after his death. “We all spoke to him, told him how much we loved him, told him that he’s a fighter, that he could fight this. We prayed for him.”
The stray bullet shooting happened days after the NYPD announced that New York City had recorded its fewest number of shooting victims in three decades — and the second-lowest murder rate — in the first half of 2025.
Originally Published: July 20, 2025 at 4:48 PM EDT
