Boy, 13, struck by stray bullet on Fourth of July in Miami-Dade

MIAMI — A 13-year-old boy was rushed to the hospital early Friday morning after he was struck by what appeared to be stray bullets the night of the Fourth of July.

Ljamyn Gray Jr. was brought into the hospital with a non-life-threatening bullet wound in his shoulder.

“My arm felt heavy and I looked at it and saw blood,” he told CBS News Miami.

Gray Jr. said he was with his friend on Independence Day when they were watching the fireworks near the apartment complex where he lives at Northwest 72nd Street and 14th Avenue. He was then shot at around 11:18 p.m., Miami-Dade Police told CBS News Miami.

“I ran to my dad and he pulled the bullet out,” Grey Jr. said.

“He came running around the corner, upstairs to me because I was sitting on the stairs in front of my porch,” said Ljamyn Gray Sr., the boy’s father. “He was like ‘Dad, something hit me in the arm!’”

When Gray Sr. took a closer look at his son’s injury, he saw the blood and found the bullet.

Video shared with CBS News Miami shows the Grays in the living room, tending to his wound with fireworks still exploding in the background, when the family decided to bring him to the hospital.

“It could have been a lot worse,” Gray Sr. said. “He could have been hit in the neck, in the head, in his chest, and he couldn’t have been here.”

“We have stray bullets that are just getting fired off,” he added. “Where young ages keep [getting] their hands on guns? How, we don’t know.”

Gray Jr. wasn’t the only person struck by a stray bullet on the Fourth of July — a 39-year-old woman was hospitalized in critical condition after she too was hit by one in Homestead.