A bleeding Staten Island minister — who was sitting in her car with her son on Christmas when they were both shot in an apparent case of mistaken identity — managed to drive several blocks to her home before screaming for her husband inside.
“I could’ve lost my wife and my son in one shot,” the shaken dad, Irvin Hall, told The Post on Tuesday, a day after the shooting.
Investigators believe the mom, Monique Hall, 42 — an optometrist and a minister at the First Central Baptist Church on Wright Street — and son Dayvon, 19, may have been unintended victims and are searching for the shooter or shooters, who fired on the pair from another car.
The distraught dad said his wife told him that two people had opened fire on her and his son.
“She made it to the house with [Dayvon] and she called 911 and I had to hold my child and he was bleeding,” Hall said breathlessly at the family’s home in New Brighton.
“I didn’t know what’s going on,” he added.
“To be sitting in the house, waiting for them to come from the store, which is just normal — you went to the store — not where your wife is outside screaming and your son is in the car and can’t move.”
Mom had just pulled their SUV away from the curb outside a deli on Jersey Street at 3:15 p.m., her son sitting beside her, when another SUV pulled out from a parking spot ahead of them, police sources told The Post.
The SUV began tailing the mother and son, and after a couple of turns, the mom realized the SUV was following them through the New Brighton neighborhood, sources said.
Suddenly, at a stop sign at Highview Avenue and Filmore Street, the female driver stuck a gun out of the driver’s side window and began shooting, sources said.
Some seven shots rang out. The minister, who is also a member of her local Community Education Council, was shot in the lower back. Her son was shot in the left shoulder and grazed in the head.
The mom has been discharged from Richmond University Medical Center, but the son, a senior at Tottenville High School, remained there Tuesday.
“My son and my wife went out to the store to pick up some odds and ends because we’re cooking for Christmas,” the dad told The Post.
“I stayed in the house. She said that on the way back from the store, a car passed by her, looked in the car and drove off. She didn’t pay it no mind, figuring, ‘Ok, they’re being nosey.’”
“But she said as she was coming back home on York Avenue, the car raced up behind them and two people started shooting out.”
“She had to speed off and then drive down a one-way street the wrong way to try to get away from them,” he added.
His wife was barely grazed, but their son was grazed on his forehead and was struck in his left shoulder.
“It’s behind his esophagus,” the dad said, worriedly, of the bullet that remains inside the son. “His breathing is fine. They just want to make sure it’s not moving,” he said of the bullet.
“He’s in pain but he’s masking his pain with his jokes,” the father said, proudly.
“I just want folks to know he’s not a drug dealer or a gangbanger,” he added. “This wasn’t no gang related thing. This was mistaken identity. It had to be.”