A kindergarten teacher who survived a mass shooting in a Bronx park that left one dead and three others wounded may spend the rest of her life with a grisly memento of the bloody carnage — a bullet that remains lodged in her lower lung and may be too dangerous to remove.
“So far, they’re telling me to take it day by day,” Jaylen Murray said from her hospital bed. “They have been draining blood from my lungs. But as of right now, I’m making a good recovery and they told me I am the most positive person for someone who has been shot.”
“It’s not something you hear every day,” she said, keeping her humor despite the horror she experienced.
Murray, 29, was inside Haffen Park in Baychester the evening of Aug. 23 when a shooting broke out at the end of a basketball game organized as a community giveback event with free back-to-school supplies for kids.
About 50 rounds were let loose as at least four shooters opened fire into a crowd inside the park from about 25 feet away, police said. The shooting, part of a bloody week of gun violence in the Bronx, left one dead and a 17-year-old clinging to life.
As the bullets flew, a stray round punched through Murray’s arm, cracked several ribs and became lodged in her lower lung, leaving her in a lot of pain.
“It’s not like every day you have an object in your lung,” Murray said. “Breathing, a lot of things are different now for me. Right now I have a tube in me helping with the breathing. It’s gonna be a road to recovery but I’m here for it, I’m alive for it and I’m ready for it.”
Relatives fear the bullet will remain in Murray’s chest since it may be too dangerous to remove.
“It’s a 50% chance she may not survive the surgery due to the bullet being on the bottom of her lung,” Murray’s worried sister Tamia Murray told The News. “They will have to cut the bottom of her lung out and stitch it back up, but if she gets internal bleeding, it will be fatal.”
“Right now they wanted to take it day by day to see if she should live with the bullet forever in the bottom of her lung versus risking her life trying to remove it,” she said.
Courtesy of family
Jaceil Blanks, 32, was killed in a mass shooting at a Bronx park on Saturday. (Courtesy of family)
The kindergarten teacher, who also works with autistic children, had showed up to the park to watch the game and support the giveback when the 7:30 p.m. shooting erupted.
“It was a perfectly beautiful day,” Murray, a longtime Harlem resident, said. “It was pretty much towards the end of the tournament. I was just talking to one of the kids who won a bookbag. He was showing off his bookbag. Then all this started.”
Murray didn’t realize that she had been shot at first, she remembered.
“It just felt like a sting kind of thing,” she recalled. “(The gunshots) sounded like fireworks, so I didn’t really bother to move. And then I felt a hot sting and I was, like, ‘Oh, girl, that’s not fireworks. You possibly just got shot.’”
“My adrenaline kicked in, and then when I heard the shots stopped, I got up and ran,” she said. “My friend noticed I had blood leaking from my arm. They’re the one who helped me get to the hospital.”
Murray has been in the hospital since Saturday as she recovers. A GoFundMe post seeking donations for her medical expenses has raised nearly $9,000.
“We lost our mom in 2017 due to cancer, and since then, Jaylen has stepped up to care for her three siblings,” Tamia wrote on the post. “She is a hardworking young woman who just graduated with her Master’s degree and is now a teacher. She has always given her all to others, and now she needs our support.”
Killed in the barrage of bullets was hospital worker Jaceil Blanks, 32, an aspiring rapper. Cops are investigating whether the shooters were targeting Blanks, 32, or anyone else specifically — or just firing indiscriminately into the crowd where Blanks stood.
Anthonaya Campbell, 17, who had moved out of the Bronx but was visiting her old neighborhood, remains in critical condition at Jacobi Medical Center with a bullet from the Saturday shooting lodged behind her eye. Two other men, ages 30 and 42, also survived the shooting with minor injuries.
Robert Royal, 25, Daeven Reyes, 20, and two teenage boys, ages 17 and 16, were nabbed at the scene, cops said. All were ordered held without bail and charged with murder, attempted murder and gun possession.
Cops recovered at least five guns at the scene. Three of them were found on three of the suspects, officials said. One was seen thrown away by one of the accused shooters and a fifth was recovered in the park during a canvas after the shooting, cops said.
A motive for the deadly gunfire, which was caught on video recovered by cops, was not immediately clear because witnesses aren’t cooperating with investigators, a police source said. The shooting is believed to be gang related in some way, police sources said.
“I think it’s senseless and it’s very pointless,” Murray said about the continuing gun violence in the Bronx with five killed in the borough in a six-day span. “Too many lives are being taken away because of things like that and it’s just not a way of living.”
Five days after the horrific incident, Murray said the Haffen Park shooting and its aftermath “still doesn’t feel real.”
But, faced with no alternative, she chooses to remain positive.
“It’s truly a blessing to still be here,” she said. “As a teacher, I’m supposed to be starting school this week with my students and getting back to setting up my classroom. It’s challenging, to be honest with you, it’s not normal. But you never know when it can be your last day, (so you should) just keep remaining positive.”
“For someone who has a bullet in me, I am still smiling,” she said, seeing the tragedy that befell her as a rebirth of sorts.
“I’m doing life over again,” she said, “and I’m going to do it right this time.”
