A neighbour who tended to a seven-year-old boy after he was shot inside his Hamilton home says the boy repeatedly asked if he was going to die.
“‘Am I going to die?’ He asked me that like three, four times,” Danny, who didn’t want give his last name, told reporters. Danny claims he is a neighbour who helped the child.
“A seven-year-old kid, why would they shoot him?”
The shooting happened on Gordon Street, near Gage Avenue North and Barton Street East, just before 7:55 p.m. Thursday.
Danny said he first walked down the street towards an apartment building to find out where the gunshots came from, initially missing the home. He then walked back when he heard a woman screaming.
“I just opened the door and walked in.” Danny said when he went up to the mother, he couldn’t understand her and found the boy lying down on the floor at the end of the hallway.
Danny said the seven-year-old boy had a gunshot wound to his lower abdomen and another on his left hand. The boy was still conscious, Danny said.
“I grabbed some clothes that were laying there, packed them into the wound and held them tight. I wrapped his hand up to stop him from bleeding,” Danny said.
Danny said the boy told him he was in pain after putting pressure on the wounds.
“He said ‘that hurts’ and I said, ‘I gotta put the pressure on to keep you from bleeding,'” Danny said, offering to sit the boy up. “He said ‘that’s a lot better.'” Danny said he knows the boy and has had conversations with him on the street.
When Hamilton Paramedics arrived, the child was initially rushed to hospital with life-threatening injuries, but Hamilton’s Deputy Police Chief Frank Bergen said his condition had upgraded to stable condition.
Bergen said someone fired a gunshot into the main floor of the house and the boy was struck. No one else was injured during the shooting.
Police have not yet arrested a suspect and there is no suspect description.
Danny said this isn’t the first time he’s helped save a child, recounting the stabbing death of a 14-year-old boy in 2014.
“Jesse Clark died here in my arms, five years ago,” Danny said.
Clark was killed by a single stab wound to the heart following an altercation between two groups of teens on Gordon Street on Aug. 18, 2014.
Friends told Global News at the time that the teens all knew each other and that the fight may have started over a small amount of money.