Lauren Silva had just parked her car in a garage and was heading to breakfast with her boyfriend and his teenage son when she heard the gunshots. Out on the street, her boyfriend and his son saw a toddler lying beneath a bleeding man. They worked to rescue him from under the man, who was unresponsive and who Silva thought was the boy’s father. When they brought the child to Silva, he had a few scrapes and his sock was covered in blood, she said. The boy kept asking whether his parents were OK, Silva said. She tried to comfort him by telling her stories about her own children, ages 3 and 7.

It was not clear where the boy’s mother was, she said. Silva carried him to the underground garage where she was parked and cleaned up the boy’s cuts. Her boyfriend and his son tried to tie a shirt around the man’s leg to stop the bleeding, she said. Silva had left her children with her parents so she could attend the parade.

“So I held him like he was my own,” she said. Moments before the shooting, Silva was walking up the garage’s stairs on her way to Walker Bros, a breakfast joint on the July Fourth parade route, when she heard the gunshots.

“You could hear it right above us,” she said, adding that the shots could be heard in rapid succession. When she went outside soon after, she said, it was silent, with almost no one around: “You didn’t hear screams. Everyone looked like they were in a trance.” At the garage, she said, she saw two older women who had been shot, and a man was looking for his 11-year-old son. When she was finished taking care of the toddler’s scrapes, she returned upstairs to find out the status of the father.

She then learned from her boyfriend that the EMTs could not stop the father’s bleeding and had covered him in a blanket. When they returned to the garage, another family who had been there saying they could take the child to the hospital, she said.

Later, Silva said, the toddler was reunited with his grandparents. Silva went straight home after. “I don’t feel anything,” she said.

New York Times News Service