A video surfaced on Wednesday, capturing a tragic moment when a young mother realized she had been struck by a stray bullet while taking a walk with her 7-month-old daughter in Brooklyn.
This heartbreaking footage from an East Williamsburg warehouse shows Liana Charles Moore’s devastating reaction as she discovered her baby had been hit in her stroller.
Charles Moore, along with the child’s father, sought refuge in a deli with their daughter Kaori and her 2-year-old brother, who was crying after hearing the loud noise.
Initially, the family thought the sound was just fireworks, but it turned out that gunshots had been fired by two individuals on a moped near Humboldt and Moore streets around 1:20 p.m.
The footage reveals the agony of the moments following little Kaori’s shooting.
In the video, Charles Moore, who was looking after his son, opened the visor of their double stroller and leaned in to check on Kaori, who had suffered a fatal injury to her head.
The painful footage depicts the distraught mother jumping and screaming, overwhelmed with emotion.
“I was holding my son. When I looked to my left, my daughter was lying there. Shot in the head. She was just bleeding. It was just too much,” Charles Moore recounted in a phone call on Wednesday.
Her collapse drew the attention of bystanders who had been oblivious to the unfolding tragedy.
The 2-year-old, originally at the back of the stroller, approached his sister’s seat, only to recoil in shock.
A man rushed to the scene, covering her mouth in disbelief at the sight, before quickly wheeling the stroller out of the area. It’s unclear if this man was Kaori’s father or simply a concerned bystander.
The young girl was transported by ambulance to Woodhull Hospital, where she was declared dead at 1:46 p.m. Her brother was treated for minor abrasions at the same hospital.
Kaori had just begun to say “mama” and hadn’t yet started walking when the shooting occurred.
Surveillance images depicted the shooter, who was firing from the passenger seat of the moped while the driver fled the scene.
Two blocks away, the suspects crashed into an oncoming vehicle, which flung the passenger onto the sidewalk, leaving him without his shoes, according to police reports.
The passenger was taken to Brooklyn Hospital, identified as a person of interest in the shooting, and was subsequently arrested for a separate domestic incident.
An extensive search is now underway for the second suspect involved in this tragedy.
