Scooter-riding “bad boys” who are terrorizing a Bronx apartment complex are to blame for shooting a 15-year-old girl and leaving her with gruesome injuries on Monday, according to her grandma, who pleaded for cops to “stop these kids.”
Paytton King, a freshman at Grace H. Dodge Career and Technical School – who is part of a local violence prevention program – was struck by a stray about 6:45 p.m. at 183rd Street and Crotona Avenue in Belmont, according to cops and her grandma Pamela King, 57.
The bullet “split her pelvis” and she was rushed to Jacobi Medical Center, where she is listed in stable condition and undergoing surgery.
Payton was still hospitalized Tuesday afternoon, according to her grandma.
“She’s not talking right now. She’s in tubes,” King said. “She has to get another surgery. [The bullet] is traveling in her body.”
“It went in her back and now it’s in the front, like her stomach area,” she added. “She’s just lying there sad right now. She’s sleeping.”
She is not believed to have been the intended target, according to police sources.
Paytton is “a lovely young girl” who “loves to play sports,” King said. She was with her siblings and pals near her apartment complex when the suspects whizzed by, letting rounds fly, her grandma said.
Her grandmother was getting out of a cab when they zoomed right past her and she heard the shots.
“It was a lot. It wouldn’t stop,” King recalled. “It was bad boys riding on scooters. I see them when they ride past me.”
“They were just randomly shooting inside the complex. [Paytton] was on her cell phone.”
Pamela said multiple people – including her own daughter – called the cops earlier in the day to report the scooter-riding teens, but no one showed up until Paytton took a bullet.
“They just do it all the time,” she said. “They come through the block and [shoot] and keep going. That’s like some fun thing to do.”
“[Neighbors] said these boys were riding around the block and circling 15, 20 times like they were looking for somebody,” King added. “Then finally I guess as it got darker they shot into the gate. They left. They ran off.”
No arrests had been made by early Tuesday evening.
“They just need to be caught,” the teen’s grandmother said. “They need to be handled because this is not going to be the end of it. They are just going to keep doing it.”
“Somebody’s gotta stop these kids,” King said. “It’s sad. They should be doing something productive with their life. They are riding on the scooters and shooting guns at people.”
Now, she is calling for the young suspects to “watch out.”
“They’re comin’ for ya, the policia,” King said. “Now you gotta answer to them. Why [are] you so angry? Go get an education and a job and a life. How about that?”
Shootings in the confines of the NYPD’s 48th Precinct, which covers the area of Monday’s violence, have increased this year, according to the latest data, updated Sunday.
Twenty-eight shooting incidents with 33 victims have been reported, up from 22 shootings with 30 victims during the same period in 2023.
Violence interrupter Steve Hemphill, part of the organization Release The Grip, blames the recent teen violence on “the guns that they’re letting in” and a lack of stiffer consequences.
“We are not saying we want our kids to go to jail,” Hemphill said. “We don’t want them to go to jail, but you gotta give them a structure. When they go to jail, you gotta teach them things.”
