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Mom 'Lucky' After Being Shot Watching a Prospect Park Little League Game
The bullet was fired by a 14-year-old boy, police said.
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.
Runner Collapses in Brooklyn Half Marathon, Hospitalized, Officials Say
A Brooklyn Half Marathon runner was taken to Coney Island Hospital in serious condition, FDNY said.
BROOKLYN — A man running in the Brooklyn Half Marathon collapsed during the race and had to be hospitalized, organizers confirmed.
Emergency workers responded to a call for help at 8:55 a.m. Saturday and treated a man in his twenties at Ocean Parkway and Avenue Y, according to the FDNY.
They rushed the man to Coney Island Hospital in serious condition, the FDNY said.
Some of the race's participants posted their worries on the New York Road Runners Facebook page.
We saw a young chap on ocean parkway being resuscitated ...Does anyone know if he's okay :(
Posted by Sanela Deljanin Radoncic on Saturday, May 16, 2015
New York Road Runners, which sponsored the marathon, confirmed that the man had been involved in the race, but refused to give details on what happened.
"That runner was attended to quickly and transported to by the hospital by emergency medical services," a spokesman said.
The group and Coney Island Hospital cited patient confidentiality regarding the man's condition.
Does anyone know the status of the young runner that went down around mile 11? I met so many finishers yesterday and everyone asked this same question. We are all very genuinely concerned and wish him the best.
Posted by Lori Lane Bowen on Sunday, May 17, 2015
"Rest assured that all runners who get injured or fall ill along the course of our races are in the best care of our medical teams and those of our partners," NYRR wrote on its Facebook page.
Runners who witnessed the incident were rattled and worried about the man days after the race.
"Someone was doing chest compressions [to him] on the ground...He didn’t have a shirt on and his shorts were black and white,” race participant Rose Maguire told DNAinfo New York on Monday. “Hopefully he made it.”
Last year during the half marathon, a runner collapsed at the finish line and died of a heart attack.
Schools to Begin Switch to Compostable Lunch Trays
Advocates hope the trays will help stop plastics and other materials getting into compostable waste.
MANHATTAN — City schools will begin to phase out Styrofoam lunch trays this month in favor of eco-friendly compostable ones, the Department of Education is expected to announce Wednesday.
All schools are expected to have the new trays for 850,000 daily meals by September, according to a newsletter from GrowNYC, which runs city greenmarkets and does outreach to schools about the city's compost program.
In making the switch, environmental advocates hope it will not only be healthier for the city's more than 1 million public school students — since polystyrene used in foam trays is listed as a "possible" human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency — but also cut down on trash that gets sent to landfills.
More than 700 city schools — including all in Manhattan and Staten Island — now participate in the city's organics collection program for food scraps and other materials that can be turned into compost or processed into natural gas.
But when the Department of Sanitation audited the 358 schools that participated during the 2013 school year, it found that contamination — when the "wrong" material ends up in the organics bin, such as foam trays, plastic containers, cutlery and plastic packaging — was significantly higher than expected, according to a January 2015 report.
The organics collected in Staten Island had contamination rates of 14 percent, in Manhattan it was 7 percent and in Brooklyn it was 3.6 percent, according to the audit.
Composting facilities reported anecdotally that organics collections from schools had contamination rates of 50 percent or more and sometimes looked "virtually indistinguishable" from regular trash, the report noted.
"DOE schools receiving organics collection service are required to participate, whether or not they want to, which could be a cause of high levels of contamination in the organics loads set out for DSNY collection," the Sanitation Department's report states.
"Feedback from DOE confirms that the most successful schools use student 'green teams' to monitor cafeteria sorting stations," it continued. "However, getting students to sort their waste in the cafeteria remains a heavy lift in the majority of schools.'"
The DOE did not immediately respond to request for comment.
"It's really gigantic that New York City is doing this," said public school mom Debby Lee Cohen, who co-founded Cafeteria Culture, which is piloting a program to improve school participation in the composting program.
Cohen wants to make sure students, teachers, administrators and custodians understand why schools are making the switch. Cafeteria signs about what to sort is insufficient without classroom education on why kids are sorting, she said.
"We're about to hand this new plate to millions of students, and they don't know why. Some kids have no idea. Some staff have no idea," Cohen said. "I look at this as a storytelling opportunity."
Her organization, which has been advocating for compostable trays for five years, has a curriculum that focuses, for instance, on how sending trash to landfills or incinerators hurts the health of local communities and how it can also lead to animal suffering and climate change.
"If you're only doing this work in the cafeteria, you're not going to get the buy-in from the teachers," she said. "In New York City, teachers don't have to be in the cafeteria. And if you haven't been in a public school cafeteria recently, you can't understand their chaotic nature."
The next big thing that schools are working on is changing from plastic utensils to compostable ones and tackling the problem of plastic packaging used for sporks, mini-burgers and sandwiches, Cohen said.
Contamination in school compost is the "start-up problem" right now, but it can be dealt with, said Eric Goldstein of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"These changes don't happen overnight," he added. "But this shift to turning food waste into usable compost and energy is definitely the way we see things heading.
"It reduces global warming emissions, saves landfill space [and] produces an end product — fertilizer — that improves soil and helps with drought resistance. Composting is the next big thing."