A 26-year-old Bronx woman who was shot in the arm when a bullet fired by a teenage neighbor tore through her wall said she was grateful she was sitting at the kitchen table — not one of her young children.
“I feel lucky.” Jasmine Lopez told the Post Tuesday, a day after she suffered a graze wound to her arm. “I’d rather it be me than any of my kids. I don’t know what I would do.”
Lopez and her husband, Roldan Valerio, 24, were sitting at the kitchen table in their apartment on Washington Avenue near East 180th Street in Belmont around 10:25 p.m. Monday, when they were startled by a loud noise.
“I was sitting at the table talking to my husband, just relaxing,” said Lopez, whose children, ages 9, 3 and 1, were in another room. “My back was to the kitchen sink. I heard a big bang.”
Her husband, Valerio, said the bullet came through the wall above the sink.
“We jumped,” he said. “We didn’t know what was happening.”
The bullet came through the wall above the sink and went through a soap bottle there, he said.
“It hit the wall across the room and bounced back and hit my wife in the arm,” he said, retracing the projectiles path.
“It then hit the cupboard door below the sink and turned right and fell on the floor in front of the fridge, near the kitchen window. I don’t know how it got over there.”
He soon saw the hole in the wall where the soap bottle had been.
“I immediately knew it was a bullet hole,” he recalled. “I ran to the living room and took my kids to the bedroom.”
Lopez said she must have been in shock at that point because she didn’t realize she was struck.
“I didn’t feel anything,” she said. “My husband told me because he saw the blood. I touched my arm and looked at it. That’s when I saw blood. Then it started to hurt.”
“I called 911 but I was so nervous, I couldn’t talk,” she said. “My husband took the phone and talked to them.”
An ambulance arrived and took her to St. Barnabas Hospital a short time later.
“The nurse told me I was lucky,” Lopez recalled. “The bullet went through the first and second layer of skin. If it didn’t stop there, it could have hit a vein or something. I would be bleeding more and it wound have been serious.”
She said she was crying when thinking about what could have happened.
“What if I was sitting in a different position and the bullet hit me in my back, my neck or my head?” she asked. “I was thinking what if my kids were in the kitchen. What if my oldest (9-year-old daughter) was washing dishes at the sink? Somebody could have died.”
A 16-year-old who lives in the adjacent apartment was taken into custody and charged with assault, criminal possession of a weapon, criminal use of a firearm and reckless endangerment, cops said.
The couple said they hadn’t heard any commotion next door and didn’t know their neighbors.
“When the police came, they were knocking on the (neighbor’s) door really hard,” Lopez said. “Someone opened the door. We heard a woman screaming, ‘Why you all taking my son? We don’t know what happened to those motherf—–s. I was sleeping.’”
The gun was thrown out a window and into a courtyard, where it was recovered, police sources said.
The couple said they are going to call the management company to see if they can be relocated.
