The pre-teen Brooklyn boy struck by a gangbanger’s stray bullet may never walk again, his family said Monday — recalling how the boy asked in the hospital, “Why can’t I feel my legs?”
Jayden Grant, 11, still has swelling around his spine four days after he caught a round in the chest outside a Crown Heights barber shop, according to his distraught but hopeful grandmother.
“Right now, Jayden has no sensation from the waist down. There is still some swelling [around his spinal cord],” said Bessie Watson-Grant, a registered nurse, outside the hospital where her grandson is on the mend. “There’s a lot of hope that when the swelling goes down, he’ll start feeling a sensation in his lower body.”
Watson-Grant, 53, said that she’d tried to pass that optimism on to Jayden as he broke into confused tears on Saturday once he was no longer intubated.
“Why can’t I feel my legs?” Watson-Grant recalled Jayden asking.
“You will,” she comforted him. “You’ve just been hurt. It’s gonna take a while.”
In the meantime, the boy has been the one staying strong for his family, they said.
“He’s comforting us. He said, ‘Grandma, you look tired, go get some rest,'” said Watson-Grant. “He told his dad, ‘It’s not your fault.'”
Grant was standing outside a barber shop near Lincoln Place and Schenectady Avenue in Crown Heights around 7 p.m. Thursday, waiting for his dad to finish getting a trim, when purported Bloods member Angel Eaddy allegedly opened fire on an gangland rival, officials have said.
That man, a 31-year-old Crip, was wounded — but so was the innocent Grant, hit in the chest, cops said.
Eaddy, 27, has been charged with attempted murder, assault and reckless endangerment, and is being held in lieu of $500,000 bond.
Watson-Grant had a message Monday for gangbangers like, it is alleged, Eaddy.
“Talk it out. Don’t use guns,” she said. “[If] somebody gets you that angry, just walk away from it. … Stop all this violence and senseless shooting.”
But for now, she’s most focused on the recovery of her grandson, who had to miss his graduation from elementary school — held the day after he was shot.
“He was a typical boy, an all-American boy,” said Watson-Grant. “Now he’s laying in a hospital bed with the inability to move his lower limbs.
“Everyone that loves Jayden is going to be impacted,” said Watson-Grant, noting how his family now may have to find a wheelchair-accessible apartment building to move to, as well as a new school with similar accommodations. “It’s going to take a village to raise him.”
And Jayden has that support: His school is working to have a small graduation ceremony for him in the hospital, and he’s received well-wishes from the firefighters who helped load him into an ambulance as well as Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez.
“I told him that a lot of people are praying for you,” said Watson-Grant. “He said, ‘Grandma, tell everybody thank you for praying for me.'”
Additional reporting by Aaron Feis