A 17-month-old girl, whose name is Anderson is injured to her face after she was shot during a rampage in West Texas that left seven dead.
The toddler, Anderson Davis, was sitting in her car seat with her twin brother when the gunman shot at her family’s car as it drove outside the Twin Peaks restaurant on Highway 191. The shooter had hijacked a mail truck, opened fire on the highway, and shot at random people before he was stopped and killed by police.
“She has a hole in her bottom lip, a hole in her tongue, and her top and bottom teeth were knocked out,” Haylee Wilkerson, a family friend, told BuzzFeed News.
Anderson had surgery on Sunday morning to remove the shrapnel in the right side of her chest. She was released from the hospital later Sunday, said Wilkerson.
The toddler doesn’t react too much about what’s going on and she was playing before the surgery.
“Her mom said she’s up playing and running around like nothing ever happened,” said 25-year-old Wilkerson, who works at the childcare center Anderson attends. “She’s a strong little girl.”
Her brother was safe and he had no injuries.
Eyewitnesses who saw the incident described the horror of seeing a bleeding baby in her mother’s arms. “She was conscious, but she was just covered in blood,” Junior Bejarano, 20, told the New York Times.
“It was horrible to see something like that,” said Bejarano, who works at Twin Peaks.
Wilkerson was one of Anderson’s first-ever caregivers. “She is a very spunky little girl,” Wilkerson said. “She’s got so much energy, she’s always happy, her smile is absolutely contagious.”
“If someone is having a bad day, they go get Anderson, they love on her, and it makes their day better instantly,” Wilkerson added.
Wilkerson set up a GoFundMe for medical bills and costs, which has already raised over $110,000. She said Anderson’s parents have asked to remain anonymous.
“Anderson is alive and that is a prayer answered bigger than I’ve ever had to pray,” her mother said in a statement posted on GoFundMe.
In a press conference on Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott read out a text message he’d received from Anderson’s mother.
“Thank you all for praying,” she texted the governor. “This is all of our worst nightmares. But thank God she is alive and relatively well.”
“Toddlers are funny because they can get shot but still want to run around and play,” she texted.
Anderson’s family lives in Odessa, and Wilkerson describing them as “the most selfless, most caring family that I’ve ever met.”
“It hits my mom heart really, really hard,” said Wilkerson. “Both of my kids slept with me last night, I wanted to hold them little tighter.”
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