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Mom 'Lucky' After Being Shot Watching a Prospect Park Little League Game

 Melissa Toomey, right, was wounded in a playground shooting, with her loving son, Sean, and husband, Brendan.
Melissa Toomey, right, was wounded in a playground shooting, with her loving son, Sean, and husband, Brendan.
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BROOKLYN — Melissa Toomey traveled to Prospect Park Tuesday afternoon to watch her 9-year-old son play Little League baseball.

As she sat on a bench waiting for the game to start, she was hit in the back with a bullet allegedly fired by a 14-year-old boy on a bicycle.

“I was sitting on a bench and from nowhere I hear three shots that sounded like came from behind me and to my right,” she recalled.

“I suddenly felt a pain in my back and I thought maybe it is a bullet, but how could I know? I had never been shot before.”

The sharp sting reminded her of a scene in the movie “Forrest Gump” when Gump describes what it felt like to be wounded in Vietnam — “Something jumped up and bit me,’” she quoted Gump as saying.

She yelled out in pain, prompting the coach to run over, look at her back and immediately start applying pressure on the bloody wound as panic-stricken spectators dialed 911.

Toomey had a bed sheet with her that she planned to spread on the grass for her and her husband, Brendan, to sit on and watch her 9-year-old son play. She now suggested the coach use it to stop the bleeding.

Meanwhile, someone had to call her husband, who was about to leave his job at Citigroup to head over to the playground outside Parade Place and Crooke Avenue.

The coach called him on Toomey’s cell phone. When her husband heard the coach’s voice, he knew something was wrong.  The coach told him there had been a shooting, and his wife had been wounded, but she was talking and paramedics were already on their way.

Toomey was rushed to Kings County Hospital trauma unit.  Along the way, she learned that a 15-year-old girl was hit in a leg.

Police managed to find the suspected shooter near the Brooklyn Museum. Toomey and the teen girl were not the targets of the shooting, sources said.

Detectives believe the shooter had a previous argument with two teen boys who he was aiming for. Police also recovered a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver reported stolen in 2010 in North Carolina. They are trying to figure out how it got into the hands of a teen.

At Kings County Hospital, doctors determined the bullet between Toomey's shoulders did not pierce vital organs but was lodged close to, but not against, her spine.

In short, they said, she was fortunate, and they decided to leave the bullet where it was to avoid blood clots and infection.  They predicted her body would work the slug out toward her skin, where it would be safely removed at another time.

“Of all bullet-wound outcomes, this is about the best I could ask for,” she said. “I am not paralyzed. No organs hit.” 

She was released from the hospital the following morning.

The Toomey Family Facebook page is filled with photos of the trio wearing New York Rangers jerseys. Late Wednesday night, after the Rangers’ nail-biting, Game 7 overtime win against Washington, her son, Sean, said the victory was a “nice gift” to her from the Broadway Blueshirts.

“What is crazy about this whole situation,” she said, “is that a couple of weeks ago, my son, who is sensitive about bad neighborhoods, was saying “Mommy and Daddy don’t got to bad neighborhoods at night.

“But this shooting was during the day, with tons of kids, in playground."

In fact, the hospital treated six shooting victims that day.

Toomey grew up during the so-called “Bad Old Days” of violence-ravaged New York, but she said "compared to where we were, we are much safer than we used to be and these sorts of fluke things happen.”

Nonetheless, she said the trauma of Tuesday’s shooting is going to take quite a while to wear off, especially for her son.

“It is going to take some time, but he will realize this is a very lucky outcome,” she said.