The horror lingers
Memory of being shot haunts teen
ALEAH DETRES was a carefree Bronx teenager only two weeks ago. But now the sound of gunfire dominates her nightmares and she walks with a limp.
Aleah, 15, was one of three innocent bystanders shot March 8 at a Bronxdale bodega.
The brave high school student was released from Jacobi Hospital last week with a bullet lodged in the muscle behind her hip.
“I mostly don’t think about what happened but sometimes I remember,” said Aleah, sitting quietly on a corduroy couch in her apartment. “I hear the gunshots and I see the blood. I dream about it.”
Mia Washington, 12, and Ricardo Acevedo, 47, were also struck during the ambush at Astor Deli Grocery just before 8 p.m.
A gunman squeezed off several shots outside the bodega, cutting down Acevedo, who was on a ladder replacing a security camera. Then the shooter, believed to be a teen, ran inside the store and fired at least two more shots.
Aleah and Mia, who were in the bodega with friends to buy snacks, were cowering in a bathroom at the back of the store when they were hit. One slug pierced Washington’s leg.
“I don’t know who he was shooting at,” Aleah said the next day. “He came in the store, looking crazy. We all ran and he started shooting. I looked down and I saw blood all over my side.”
Cops suspect the gunman was aiming at an individual standing outside the bodega. But the shooter fled the scene and no arrests have been made. The police do have a lead, said 49th Precinct Deputy Inspector Kevin Nicholson, vowing that “the precinct is giving the case 1000%.”
“I hope he gets caught,” said Aleah’s mother Colleen Yulfo, gazing at her daughter with concern. “I pray every day he gets caught. I get so scared now. I don’t let her go outside.”
Her doctors have ordered Aleah, a freshman at West Bronx Academy for the Future on the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus, to stay home from school for two months, due to the “sharp, burning” pain in her hip.
The aspiring ultrasound technician with long black hair was shot weeks after a stray bullet injured 8-year-old Armando Bigo as he scanned a bodega potato chip rack in Soundview.
“Where are these kids getting all these guns?” said Yulfo. “You feel like you have to look over your shoulder all the time. No one should have to live like that.”
Mia Washington is back home recovering from surgery, Yulfo said.
Gun violence has surged in the Bronx, with 62 shootings claiming 81 victims so far in 2012, versus 47 incidents and 62 victims over the same period last year, according to NYPD stats.
Before she was shot, Aleah’s favorite television show was CSI: Miami. Now the blood-and-guts drama hits too close to home.
“I don't watch it anymore," she said, looking at the tiny, black bullet hole above her Mickey Mouse pajama bottoms. “I don’t want to see that stuff for a while.” dbeekman@nydailynews.com