A 12-year-old riding his bike was struck by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting

A 7-year-old girl shot in the foot while resting on her great-grandmother’s couch. A 13-year-old girl walking home from school, struck in the arm. A 15-year-old boy shot in the back on a playground.

And now, a 12-year-old boy, caught in the crossfire while riding his bike around his South Philadelphia block, shot once in the back.

Philadelphia’s gun violence crisis continues to dramatically impact the lives of children, with bullets flying at all times of day and across multiple sections of the city, sometimes claiming lives, but more often leaving the city’s youngest and most vulnerable with lifelong physical and emotional scars.

In the most recent incident, a 12-year-old boy was injured Thursday night, just after 8:30 p.m., when a car drove up the 2300 block of Tasker Street and a shooter fired more than a dozen times, potentially aiming toward a man standing outside speaking with his girlfriend, said Capt. James Kearney, head of the Police Department’s Non-fatal Shootings Unit.

The boy was struck once in the back, Kearney said. He was rushed to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and was in stable condition.

» READ MORE: Philly’s kids are grieving alone from the far-reaching trauma of gun violence, advocates say

A 30-year-old man was also shot in the right leg, Kearney said. He initially tried to drive himself to the hospital, before police found him and took him to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he is stable, Kearney said.

Kearney said the motive for the shooting remains under investigation. Detectives recovered 14 shell casings at the scene from two different caliber handguns.

The 12-year-old is one of more than 50 children in the city to be shot in Philadelphia this year. Seven have died.

In April alone, as of Friday morning, 15 children have been shot, including six in just the last week.

Children make up about 10% of the city’s more than 500 shooting victims this year — a proportion that has grown in recent years as gun violence has spiked. And although shootings have dropped slightly this year, with homicides in the city down about 12% compared to 2022, the number of children shot remains at higher levels.

On Friday, the Point Breeze block where the boy was shot was empty and quiet except for a few groups of people, dressed in traditional Muslim garb, on their way to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the last day of Ramadan. Neighbors were mostly not home, or declined to talk about what happened.

One young man said he knew the child’s family, and that he was hospitalized and doing OK.

Residents of this block of Tasker Street have been exposed to violence before. In 2020, there were three shootings on the block.

Research has long shown the mental toll violence has on children. A 2021 study by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia found that after a shooting occurred, the number of emergency department visits for mental health complaints for children who lived nearby increased for weeks. The study found that children who lived close to shootings were 134% more likely to visit the ER with a mental health issue.

“The general public tends to have this assumption that if you get shot … you were involved in something,” said Elinore Kaufman, medical director of Penn’s Trauma Violence Recovery Program, which provides individualized support and case management to survivors of violent injury.

» READ MORE: Rec centers near gun violence hot spots will soon offer trauma therapy: ‘It’s something we never had’

“But we see people all the time who were playing basketball, riding a bike, at the laundromat … shot through their home window,” said Kaufman. “It’s not the wrong place, wrong time. It’s people doing what they should be doing in places that should be safe but that we have made unsafe.”

Kaufman, a surgeon, said 25% of children who survive a gun injury are later diagnosed with a mental health disorder, like anxiety or depression, and that those diagnoses are often coupled with issues like substance abuse and poor school performance.

She said the city must look beyond traditional safety measures like law enforcement and reinvest in communities of color and support the city’s children by expanding mental health services, green space and recreation.