A 55-year-old longtime New Yorker was grazed by a stray bullet while walking on Central Park West on Thursday evening — choking up as she recounted the “terrifying” ordeal to The Post.
The innocent bystander, who did not want to be identified, said she suddenly found herself in the line of fire around 8:40 p.m. as she went to catch a bus at the park and West 108th Street in Manhattan.
“Somebody got off the bus and shot at the man on the street,” the victim told The Post by phone Friday. “I had to quickly pivot from, ‘Oh, I’m not going to make that bus’ [to], ‘I need to go the other way.’
“I think as I turned around, that’s when I knew I got hit,” the woman said. “And those two people were still out there, so I just tried to hurry away, back to where my friends were in the restaurant to get help.”
The injured woman was rushed to Mount Sinai Morningside, where she was listed in stable condition, police said.
“It’s going to heal,” she said of her graze wound — but added that the emotional impact hit her even harder.
“The panic I felt and how close it was — terrifying,” she said, becoming choked up. “And that could have just as easily been an inch away from something [worse] on that street, and having nobody knowing that I was there.”
The suspected shooter, last seen wearing all black, fled the Upper West Side scene on foot, law-enforcement sources said.
The victim — who has lived in the Big Apple since 1993 — said it’s too soon to tell whether she feels comfortable walking the city streets again.
“It’s so acute right now, I can’t even tell you. I have to figure it out,” the woman said.
“It’s just a problem. It’s got to get solved. It’s too chaotic,” she said of street crime.
The New Yorker said the police response to her shooting was “excellent” but added that something needs to change system-wide.
“There are people who feel that they can go around threatening and shooting at each other, and why do they feel that way?” she said. “What consequences or lack of consequences are there? I don’t know.”
The woman appeared to be third person shot so far this year in the NYPD’s 24th Precinct.
The latest department data, updated Sunday, showed that two people were hurt in a single shooting in the precinct’s confines.
In that early January shooting, a 16-year-old boy was blasted in the stomach and another male, whose age was unclear, was struck in the hip inside a deli on the corner of West 92nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, police said at the time.
Both victims were taken to nearby hospitals in stable condition, according to police.
No one had been shot in the precinct during the same period last year, statistics show.
Citywide, two innocent bystanders were fatally shot in recent weeks.
Grandmother and trailblazing Harlem bodega owner Excenia Mette, 61, was caught in crossfire and fatally shot in the head April 22 when she ran outside to check on her grandson.
Another innocent bystander, 28-year-old plumber’s apprentice Daoud Marji, was also killed by a stray bullet to the head just a day later while he was visiting a pal in The Bronx.
