She’s one tough granny.
An 87-year-old Bronx woman who was shot in the neck during a broad-daylight burst of gunfire by a trio of armed teens said she had no idea she’d been hit until a stranger pointed out the blood pouring down her neck.
“I just go through this gate, and I was standing,” Elticeal Grant told The Post Thursday from her home behind a metal gate in Wakefield. “Someone said to me ‘You’re bleeding, you get shot.”
Then, a bystander ran up to her with paper towels “and start to sop up the blood, sop up the blood, sop of the blood,” she said, repeating the phrase for dramatic emphasis.
“I was bleeding so much,” said Grant. “That’s all I know.”
Grant was hit by a stray bullet at East 224th Street and Barnes Avenue around 3:50 p.m. on July 31, according to police. An 18-year-old man was also struck in the hip and survived.
Three 16-year-olds were arrested — two of whom were charged with attempted murder and weapons possession, said police. The third faces only a charge of weapons possession.
Grant didn’t remember seeing or hearing anyone firing a gun.
“I was walking along the road,” she said. “The only thing I saw was cars parked in the road. I didn’t see anyone.”
She said she became cold and and started shivering after she was hit, as the bullet left a wound beneath her earlobe.
“It’s crazy that she was shot,” said her niece Keisha McCrea, adding that her aunt has “at least 10” grandchildren and some great-grandchildren.
Her aunt is “a nice lady” who moved to the neighborhood 20 years ago from the island of Jamaica, she said.
“Nothing like that ever happened to her there,” she said. “It hurts to see it happen here.”
Grant’s home nurse said the shooters should be locked up regardless of the state’s Raise the Age Law, which lifted the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18 and has led to rising youth gun violence.
“If you’re out here shooting, you should just be in jail,” said the nurse, who identified herself as Mary Jane. “Or, like, they have those … juvenile programs. They should at least go there. Not home, though.”
The city’s two juvenile detention centers — Horizon in the Bronz and Crossroads in Brooklyn — have faced severe overcrowding and are often operating at or above maximum capacity, according to city data online.
She also said the teens may have been working for drug dealers in the area.
“There’s older people … like the big drug dealers … that are literally using the young teenage boys because they know that they have that advantage,” she said. “They’re just using them.”
Shooting victims in the Bronx’s 47 Precinct have increased 18% to 26 so far this year compared to the 22 at this point last year, according to NYPD data. The number of shooting victims citywide has decreased by 5% to 474 from 491, the data show.
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