2 Youths Are Wounded In Drive-By Shooting

A drive-by shooting into a group of mostly young people outside a Southeast Washington apartment building late Monday night wounded a girl, 9, and a boy, 15, both of whom are expected to recover.

And there was nearly a third victim, 49-year-old Deborah Johnson, who was in an upbeat mood yesterday, delighted to be drawing breath.

"The cop told me I'm lucky to be alive!" she said.

In her bedroom in the first-floor apartment that she shares with her grown daughters, Johnson pointed to the holes in the window where two bullets crashed through.

She said she was dozing on her bed, watching an on-demand rerun of "The Bachelor," her favorite reality TV show. "I just heard, like, gunshots," she recalled. "I heard something say, 'Boom, boom, boom, boom.' . . . That's when I jumped up.

"Then I laid back down real fast."

It was real reality -- a spasm of near tragic violence on a humid spring evening.

The shooting occurred just after 11 p.m. outside building No. 2657 of the Washington View Apartments, a neatly maintained complex of beige brick buildings on a hillside along Stanton Road SE, on the southern edge of Anacostia.

Police said a crowd of mainly youngsters was hanging around on the walkway outside the building's entrance, just a few feet from Johnson's bedroom window, when a car pulled up. Witnesses later told detectives that the car was big and green, police said.

Someone in the vehicle sprayed shots into the group on the walkway, and then the car drove away, police said. Investigators do not think either of the wounded youngsters was the intended target of the attack, a police official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the shooting was under investigation last night.

The complex was quiet in the oppressive heat yesterday afternoon. The sparse foot traffic around the shooting scene was mostly old people carrying groceries home, women in their 20s with small children and shirtless young men wandering about. They shrugged and said they heard about the shooting but didn't know who the victims were.

Police said the girl lives in the 2657 building, and the boy lives elsewhere in the complex. Their wounds were described as relatively minor.

Johnson said she saw nothing, just heard the shots.

"There was one right here," she said, pointing to the bullet hole on the right side of her bedroom window. That slug lodged in the dresser that she keeps in front of the window. "And this is the other one here," she said, indicating the second hole, on the left side of the window.

It was just then that she realized: There was no second bullet hole in the dresser. The slug apparently had zipped across the room, a foot or so above the bed as she was stretched out, enjoying "The Bachelor."

"I didn't never think about it that way," she said, half in a whisper. "Oh, my God. . . ."