WASHINGTON — A 12-year-old girl is recovering from a gunshot wound, shot by a stray bullet which struck her as she lay asleep in her bed.
According to DC Police, shots were fired in the 2500 block of Naylor Road, Southeast.
This reporter heard the gunshots: four shots, a brief pause, followed by nine consecutive shots: "As I turned over in bed, I saw the clock read 4:05 a.m. When 12-year-old Anaya turned over in her bed, she was shot."
Antrineice Brown said, “She woke us up at 4 o’clock in the morning and she just screamed.”
Her daughter, Anaya, was sleeping soundly when a bullet tore through the 12-year-old basketball player’s leg just above the knee.
“We just ran in here (her bedroom) asked if she was OK and asked if she scraped her leg. It was bleeding and the blood was just flowing. That’s when we start searching the room to figure out what was going on and we located the bullet hole in the mattress,” Brown said.
The bullet tore a tiny hole in the screen of the 3rd floor window in the apartment building at 2600 Naylor Road, SE.
Brown said the bullet hit her daughter who was sleeping in the top bunk. Detectives told the mom when Anaya rolled over in bed, she stopped the bullet from traveling through the mattress to hit her siblings: her 4-year-old brother sleeping behind her and two others below her on the bottom bunk. Brown said police later found the bullet lodged in the mattress.
“Me and her stepfather were panicking, but she was calm and kept telling us she was ‘OK,” recalled Brown. “Thank God it didn’t hit him (the 4-year-old) or her siblings.
Across the street, WUSA9 met another mom who was on the phone with her case worker.
“This is a life-or-death situation,” she said. “I have multiple police reports in the three years I’ve lived here.”
Princess lives right across the street in 2501 Naylor Road, SE and she showed WUSA9 a bullet hole in her first floor window from last Saturday.
“I heard a lot of commotion and heard people screaming about the gun, so I hurried up, cut my light off, and got up out of the room and I went in the room with my kids,” she explained. “No more than 30 seconds later, the gunshots went off and the bullet was coming through my window, like a big a-- machine gun!”
Meanwhile back at 2600, Brown said her daughter is too afraid to come home. She’s recovering at a family members house in Maryland.
“I’m just trying to find somewhere to relocate my family to safety,” she said.
Two mothers, two apartments, right across the street from each other on Naylor Road – trying to keep their families safe when they feel their homes are under attack.
“We don’t give a f--- about hearing gunshots, but when it starts coming through windows and coming through the house with my kids,” said Princess. “I feel like my life is being threatened.”
“The gun violence, it really has to stop,” added Brown. “We hear gunshots here every day and the police are outside looking for gun casings. We’re up in the middle of the night because we hear it, but just this one night, everybody was asleep.”
On top of the violence, WUSA9 discovered 2600 Naylor Road has 31 housing code violations including mold. That’s why Brown said her children were all sleeping in one room. According to Department of Buildings, the owners have over $380,000 in unpaid fines.