Young girl recovers from bullet wound

It wasn’t the Father’s Day they had imagined. 

Nine-year-old  and her mother were coming back from shopping for all the trappings to make a Father’s Day picnic June 14, when the child was struck by a bullet intended for someone else. 

The PS 95 second-grader was released from the Jacobi Medical Center on Sunday.  And it was she, not her dad, who was being showered with affection by friends and neighbors as she dared to come back outside and watch her brother play T-ball for the Kingsbridge Little League. 

Her mother, Magaly Cintron, said Amanda had been resting after being released from the juvenile section of the hospital around 1:30 p.m. that day, when shout-outs by the game’s announcer at nearby Cooney Grauer Field beckoned her daughter downstairs. 

The window to Amanda’s apartment in the Fort Independence Houses faces the field where the Kingsbridge Little League plays its home games.  

 “‘Amanda, we love you, you’re a strong little girl,’” Ms. Cintron said they heard from the window. 

 “She heard it and wanted to come out,” Ms. Cintron said, admitting that getting the girl outside required some coaxing. 

Ms. Cintron said the night her daughter was shot, she and Amanda were returning from shopping. Ms. Cintron brought the shopping bags upstairs and allowed Amanda to stay outside and play with her brother under the supervision of Ms. Cintron’s boyfriend. 

Around 15 minutes later, she said, “I heard the gunshots.”

After running to the window, her boyfriend called to tell her to come down because Amanda had been hit. 

A male riding a bicycle fired six shots at around 9:20 p.m., police said. Ms. Cintron said doctors believe one bullet ricocheted off the ground and gave Amanda a superficial stomach wound. 

On Sunday, the slight girl watched the game from a foldout chair off of right field, wearing pink shorts and matching pink and white high-top sneakers, while munching on a packet of Skittles. A small piece of gauze on her arm was the only visible remnant of the ordeal she had endured.