The tourist struck by a migrant’s bullet in Times Square sent her husband back home in Brazil a terrified audio message begging him to “Help! Help!”
“My love, I’ve been shot, my love! I am going to send you my location, my love. Help! Help!” Tatiele Ribeiro Lemons said in the audio message, which was broadcast Tuesday by Campinas E Região, a Brazilian news outlet.
Sitting next to his wounded wife during the broadcast, Luiz Fernando Orosz said he still has to control his emotions when he thinks of the moment Jesus Alejandro Rivas-Figueroa allegedly shot Lemons in the leg while firing at a security guard at JD Sports on West 42nd Street on Feb. 8.
“We have a daughter who is one-and-a-half. It’s Carnival [in Rio de Janeiro] and I went to exchange her costume. I was with the girl at the store doing the exchange. She called, I was in the middle of the exchange but I hit her audio.
“I was in shock. She’s my wife. What was our daughter going to do without her mother? Where was she? Was she on the ground?” Orosz continued.
Lemons, 38, who was visiting the Big Apple with her mother-in-law, previously told NBC 4 that she was standing near the cash register, holding tennis shoes she was buying as a gift when the shots rang out around 7 p.m.
She heard what “sounded like an explosion” before she felt searing pain in her leg and dragged herself to the back of the store, she recalled in the Feb. 9 interview.
Lemons was taken to Bellevue Hospital where she received 13 stitches to close the gash in her leg. She returned home to Campinas on Feb. 10.
“I believe I was born again. [It was] a bad experience but thank God. I am happy to be alive,” Lemons told the Brazilian outlet, adding that she does not plan to return to the United States “anytime soon.”
Rivas-Figueroa — who turned his gun on pursuing NYPD officers after he struck Lemons — has been charged as an adult with attempted murder in connection to the shooting. A judge ordered he be held without bail in a juvenile detention center.
