A 5-year-old girl was critically wounded Thursday afternoon, struck by a stray bullet fired by a young man who left a Southwest Baltimore street fight and returned with a gun, police said.
The girl was on life support last night at University of Maryland Medical Center, where Mayor Sheila Dixon said her family was distraught and looking for answers.
At the crime scene, swarms of people crowded around an intersection within view of two small, pink sandals and a pool of blood on Pulaski Street.
"This 5-year-old is fighting for her life," Dixon said after meeting with the girl's family. "I'm very angry about this. These thugs, for whatever reason, just don't care about life."
Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III said the community is cooperating with authorities and that several "persons of interest" had been taken into custody. The suspect, initially believed to be holed up in a nearby home that was raided by tactical units, remained elusive, but police said they had solid leads, including surveillance camera footage.
"We're very confident based on what's coming in at this time that we'll have a suspect," Bealefeld said.
Josephine Harmanson, a mother of seven, said she heard the shots and ran to the scene. She said two women were huddled over the girl, who appeared to be trying to get up.
"Her little fingers were moving, and she was trying to get up and go home, like she didn't know what had happened," Harmanson said.
"You see it all the time here," she said, referring to gun violence, "but I've never seen it like that."
It has been years since such a young child was fatally wounded as a consequence of the city's street violence, according to records. Last August, a 6-year-old boy was wounded by a stray bullet in a shootout, but records show there hasn't been a fatal shooting of a child under age 10 in several years.
Overall, nine juveniles have been killed in Baltimore this year.
Thursday's shooting occurred just after 4 p.m. in the 300 block of Pulaski St., in the city's Carrollton Ridge neighborhood. Bealefeld said two young men were engaged in a street fight that had appeared to be finished after one of them left.
But he returned shortly with a semi- automatic weapon and opened fire. One of the bullets struck the girl in the head as she returned from running errands with a relative.
