CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A powerful image shows a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer holding a 6-month-old baby just moments after her mother was shot seven times and was fighting for her life in February.
The mother survived the shooting, and three months later, she reunited with Officer Gil Allred.
"(The child) was drooling on my uniform, sleeping, and I was like, 'That's the best thing that's been on my uniform today,'" Allred said.
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The mother, who didn’t want to be identified, was shot seven times. She went from being a college student on the verge of graduating to being a gunshot survivor.
The woman talked only to Channel 9 about what she went through.
(Curtis Kerr)
She was alone, feeding her baby, when someone banged on the door of her Wexford Meadows Lane apartment.
The door flew open and the mother was face-to-face with a man holding a gun.
"It was like a loud bang,” she said. “You could tell it was like angry. It was, ‘Boom, boom, boom.’ He had a gun in his hands, so I knew what it was. He was coming to kill and I saw it in his eyes."
Police said the mother had never seen the man before and that he was looking for one of her relatives who wasn't around.
"He cursed, and then he put his bandana on,” she said. “I just turned around and ran for my daughter."
Her baby girl was on the sofa, but before she could get to her, one of the rounds hit her in the shoulder.
"My first thing was to roll my body over her to protect her,” she said.
The woman spent weeks at the hospital. She lost a kidney, her spleen and part of her stomach, pancreas and liver.
Her baby, amazingly, wasn’t touched.
"I told my mom, I said, ‘I checked her first before I dialed 911, because if she was hit, I would have just gave up, I would have just laid there and died,'” she said. “I wouldn’t have tried to survive if my baby got hit."
Allred said he prayed for both the mother and the child, but wasn’t hopeful because of the number of times she was shot in the abdomen.
"Once they leave the scene with Medic alive, we don't get a chance to see them again, and we don't expect most people to live,” Allred said.
The woman now only has a slight limp.
"I don't like to tell my story,” she said. “I don't because I'm still dealing with it mentally, myself."
The woman had the chance to reunite with Allred.
"What is my purpose? I'm trying to find my purpose. I know my No. 1 purpose is to be a mom,” she said.
"Girl, the Lord has a plan for you,” the officer told the woman. “I'm trying to figure it out. You're not going to figure it out, not until it happens. God never tells anyone that, but he has a plan for you."
Curtis Kerr, 36, is charged with attempted murder in connection with the shooting and is out on bond on electronic monitoring.
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