Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 5, 1991 TAG: 9102050342
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON BROWN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The bullet cut a groove along the side of Moneka Small's face, from just below her eye to her temple, as it whizzed by her head. She was walking along 18th Street Southwest about 2:30 p.m. with her mother and 3-year-old brother, Lee.
Neasia Small, the child's 23-year-old mother, said the girl will remain in Roanoke Memorial Hospital the rest of the week. She will have to undergo plastic surgery to repair her wound.
A 17-year-old was charged with malicious wounding in connection with the shooting. Authorities would not release his name because he is considered a juvenile by the courts.
The youth was arrested along the railroad tracks near 10th Street and Norfolk Avenue Southwest after he bolted from a car and tried to run from police. At least one officer chased him on foot.
Monday night, police still were seeking other persons involved in the shooting.
Neasia Small, interviewed at the hospital Monday night, gave the following account:
Earlier in the day, she and her two children had walked to the Hurt Park housing project to find her sister. Small, who is training to be a file clerk at the Roanoke Circuit Court clerk's office, had been babysitting her 6-month-old niece.
As she and her children walked back toward their house on Patterson Avenue, the children were playing and teasing a dog through a fence. "Doggie, you can't get me," they chanted.
With the children in front, Small walked past a small store near 18th Street and Salem Avenue. Suddenly, a big white car with 30-day license tags hurriedly pulled into the parking lot and screeched to a halt.
"I thought they were just going into the store," Small said. "Some people drive crazy like that."
Two men and a woman jumped from the car. The woman, a front-seat passenger, ran around and stood by the driver in the parking lot.
The man then started yelling across the street toward Hurt Park.
"Here's my girl! What's you going to do?!" Small remembered him yelling. "Come on! Come on across the street!"
The driver continued to yell. Small then saw that he had a silver handgun and was trying to hide it behind his back.
When she saw the gun, she began hurrying her children down the street, pushing them along. Small heard two shots ring out from behind. Then she heard two shots from further away. She couldn't see who was firing.
She heard glass shattering a window of a house, and she kept pushing the children.
"I was just thinking, `We have to get to the house,' " she said. "I just couldn't see who was returning the shots. I was mostly scared because I had my kids with me.
"I . . . thought if they hit me, where were the kids going to go? I thought they'd just stop running."
She said she was afraid of dying. Her fear increased as a second volley of shots rang out.
"When they started up again, I knew we weren't going to make it to the house," she said.
Small dropped to the ground and pulled 3-year-old Lee with her, keeping his head down with her hand. She yelled to Moneka, who had run ahead, to fall down. As the child fell to the ground, the bullet cut into her face. She jumped up and started screaming from fear and pain.
"They shot two more times after she got shot," Small said.
"I knew she was bleeding. I didn't know how bad it was. I thought her eye was gone." She grabbed Moneka, pulled her to the ground and covered the wound with her coat sleeve.
Meanwhile, the man who had originally been riding in the back seat drove the car away as the other man and woman hunkered down in an alley near the store. They fled as police arrived.
Small, still teary-eyed four hours after the shooting, was mystified by what had taken place.
"You hear about innocent bystanders in New York being shot," she said. `I didn't think it would happen here."
Moneka's concerns were more basic. "Have they caught him?" her mother said she had asked. "Is he in jail?"
by CNB