Piercing Bystanders' Innocence

Stray Gunfire Scars Survivors -- and City

The .45-caliber bullet is still lodged in Mia Adgerson's rib cage, close to her heart. For the rest of her life, she will carry it around -- a permanent reminder of how close she came to being killed by a bullet intended for someone else.

"Every time I hear about another shooting like that, I have this little moment and I think about when I got shot," said Mia, 15, who was wounded three years ago on a cousin's balcony in Columbia Heights. "And sometimes I cry for all the people who are getting shot now."

The District has a long history of high-profile cases involving random gunfire, which first attracted wide notice during the drug-turf wars of the 1980s. The drug wars have calmed, but random shootings have remained a part of life in the city.

These shootings are different from other forms of violence, their impact often more powerful and unsettling. When a stray bullet pierced the window of a Northeast Washington home May 3 and killed an 8-year-old girl as she played with her dolls, parents across the region were reminded that they never can really shield their children from violent crime. Three weeks later, a 12-year-old girl in Northwest was shot and wounded while sitting on her front porch. In a city where gunfire is common, the public fear seemed justified: A grandmother walking down a street or a group of children splashing in a pool were all potential victims.

Although police do not keep separate records on such incidents, they acknowledge that each time another innocent bystander is shot, the psyche of the community is further damaged.

"Whenever one of these events happens, it really brings home to a city the fact that you could be standing anywhere and be struck down by a bullet," D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said. "All you need is one or two of these shootings to really shatter a city."

Ramsey estimated that during his 30-year law enforcement career, only about 1 percent of shooting cases has involved an unintended victim.

One of the few studies available of such incidents, published in 1989 in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, also arrived at the 1 percent figure, using data culled from newspaper reports in the District, New York, Boston and Los Angeles from 1977 to 1988. The study also noted that the number of incidents was increasing and that such shootings "rank at the top of public outrage."

Since then, the crime surges of the late 1980s and 1990s have ratcheted up the numbers, said Northeastern University criminologist Jack Levin, who believes that in the past decade, nearly 10 percent of shootings nationwide involved unintended victims. "It's an indirect measure of something more frightening," he said, "an absence of security."

The public attention to random shootings places intense pressure on police to make an arrest quickly. But law enforcement officials have said these cases are difficult to solve, and make an obvious point: No one can predict or prevent the next stray bullet.

"The worst thing about cases like this: There's really nothing you can do about it," said former D.C. police chief Isaac Fulwood Jr., who teamed with the National Guard to flood the streets with patrols during his tenure from 1989 to 1993, when dozens of such cases were in the news. "You become completely helpless because you'll never be able to put an officer on every street corner."

Even the shooters in these cases are often mystified by the turn of events. After two District men were found guilty in 1992 for their part in one of the most notorious cases of the 1990s -- the fatal shooting of Marcia Williams, a mother of three, as she drove along North Capitol Street -- they appealed on the grounds that they had been aiming at a rival that day, not at Williams. During the trial, Superior Court Judge A. Franklin Burgess Jr. instructed the jury that the defendants' intent in the shooting could be transferred to Williams, the victim. Upheld on appeal, the doctrine of transferred intent serves as a legal cornerstone in many similar random-bullet cases.

"You can catch these guys, you can lock them up, but you can't change their mentality," Ramsey said. "It's amazing -- just about every one of these guys thinks he didn't do anything wrong because he didn't intend to kill the person who was shot. They tell us, 'But I didn't mean to hit so-and-so,' and they show no remorse -- they're just upset that they missed their intended target. That's the mentality I wish we could change."

A Survivor's Silence

In her new life in an Ohio college town, Tiece Ruffins, 25, has kept quiet about her past as a gunshot survivor. She feels the bullet scar on her left leg reveals exactly where she came from.