The 7-month-old girl killed by a stray bullet in Brooklyn while her parents pushed her in a stroller Wednesday afternoon had just learned to say “mama,” the baby’s heartbroken family revealed.
The tragic tot, Kaori, was seated with her brother in a double stroller when “something went off” near Humboldt and Moore Streets in East Williamsburg, their mother, Lianna Charles-Moore, said in a phone interview.
Those loud blasts turned out to be gunshots fired by a thug on the back of a moped, but the distraught parents didn’t realize it at first.
“We thought it was fireworks, but my son jumped out of the stroller, and I picked him up and carried him,” Charles-Moore, 20, recalled.
“I was hugging him, and then when I looked to my left, my daughter was just there, lying there. She was shot in the head. She was just bleeding. It was just too much,” she said.
The tearful mother revealed that her 2-year-old son had also been grazed in his back by a bullet and has been asking for his sister ever since she was fatally shot.
“My daughter was innocent. She didn’t deserve that. We were just going outside to go get her a few things, and my son a few things. My son got impacted with everything that happened, yeah, so it was just too much, because they could have killed my son and my daughter,” Charles-Moore said.
Family members remembered the 7-month-old as a bubbly baby who was “always laughing” and said she just reached a heartbreaking milestone.
“She just started saying, ‘Mama,’ she just started, like, almost about to crawl, like it was just a whole bunch of stuff that she was just learning how to do,” her mother said.
Kaori’s grandmother, Linda Moore Oyinkoinyan, recalled collapsing at her job as a 3-K public school teacher after receiving a frantic call from her daughter about the tragic shooting.
“I was supposed to get them today or tomorrow. I’m a teacher, so I have off, and I was going to take them,” Oyinkoinyan said.
“My daughter called me at my job. She was screaming. I had to hang up on her. She was scaring me. She said, ‘They shot Kaori in the head.’ She was screaming. She was frantic. I just passed out in the class,” the grandmother recalled as her heartbroken grandson held her hand.
Oyinkoinyan remembered her slain granddaughter as a “beautiful spirit” who was always giggling.
“She was loving. She was caring. Always smiling. She was very smart. The baby was very beautiful. She brought a lot of people together,” Oyinkoinyan said.
“It’s heartbreaking,” she added.
The shooting, described as gang-related, took place around 1:20 p.m, when the gunmen pulled up on a moped and opened fire into a crowd before speeding off, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a press briefing.