The girl had been shot in the right thigh, a single wound that burned but was not fatal.
TRENTON — Georgette Truitt was upstairs in her Sanhican Drive home late Tuesday night when she heard the gunshots.
Then, she heard her 15-year-old daughter screaming.
“’Mom, mom, mom, mom, I’ve been shot!’” she said she heard.
Truitt experienced a split second where fear just overwhelmed her. Then, she hurried down the stairs to the street. Truitt, a nurse, said later she didn’t know whether she was going to find her daughter bleeding to death, and described on Thursday afternoon how she felt.
“Nervous — didn’t know what I was coming down to see, whether it was her laid out on the sidewalk,” Truitt said.
But her daughter, who was standing on the front lawn when the shooting started, had made an intelligent move. When the two gunman came through the side yard between her mother’s home and their neighbors’, the teen ran for a parked car that had its passenger door open.
“She dove in the car, laid down until the shots stopped,” Truitt said.
The girl had been shot in the right thigh, a single wound that burned but was not fatal. On Thursday, she was recovering at home with pain medicine, her leg propped up on the couch. She did not want to talk about the ordeal.
Georgette Truitt, however, has become increasingly outspoken in the 18 months since she moved to the first block of Sanhican Drive. About a third of the spacious, pre-World War II homes on Sanhican are abandoned and have fallen into disrepair.
Worst of all is the defiant, open-air drug dealing takes place all up and down the block, Truitt said, degrading the quality of life for everyone.
“I sit here on my porch or stand in my door and watch people with Pa. plates drive up into people’s driveways and wait to get served their drugs,” Truitt said.
Drug dealers set up shop in abandoned homes and private driveways alike, she says, on stoops when residents are away at work and out in front of people’s houses. Some of the drug dealers will talk back to homeowners telling them to get off their property. Truitt takes a hard line, but tries to express it sweetly.
“’Excuse me, you’re in front of my house,’” she said she tells them. “’If you’re not here for Bible study or prayer meeting, you have to move.”
There’s no set time for drug deals on Sanhican, she says. The drug trade is steady, constant — and driven by out-of-towners: “95 percent of the cars that are here have Pa. plates and white people in them,” she said.
The Trenton police are a welcome sight on the street, but she says they’re clearly overwhelmed. Police officers had been on the street barely two hours before the shooting that wounded her daughter Tuesday night. A 24-year-old man who was seriously wounded in the shooting had his birthday on Tuesday, and revelers shut down the street for an unauthorized block party, Truitt said. Cops arrived and broke the party up around 9 p.m., including some young men they flushed out of an abandoned home.
As Truitt went upstairs to the bathroom, her daughter stepped off the porch to briefly speak with the 24-year-old.
That’s when the gunman came up from behind Truitt’s house and started shooting across her lawn.
The man her daughter had been speaking to fell from a bullet wound about 15 feet to the right of the porch, and a 25-year-old man was grazed in the ankle by a bullet and went down 20 feet to the left, she said.
Police have not made any arrests in the shooting, but said the investigation is ongoing. A full description of the suspects was not available.
While violence occasionally visits Truitt’s street, trash and weeds and dilapidated buildings are a constant presence.
Vacant buildings are mixed with inhabited ones. Some of the abandoned properties have weeds several feet high, overgrown shrubbery consuming their facades. Windows are smashed out, boards are askew, and some of the houses are open and used for illegal activity.
“You got absentee landlords here that don’t take care of them,” Truitt said.
She says she has a rental property, too, but takes care of it because it’s a matter of pride.
Truitt helped form the Parkside West Civic Association, covering the neighborhood between Sullivan Way and Parkside Avenue. City council President Phyllis Holly-Ward, who owns a beauty shop on Edgewood Avenue one block behind Truitt’s, said the police department was working as best as it could with low numbers to keep the area under control.
“The one thing I can tell you is, obviously, they know it’s there,” she said of the drug offenses. “I can’t say anything bad — they do patrol there.”
Truitt’s daughter was back at home the day after the shooting. Later that day young men from the neighborhood — including those who were out partying Tuesday night — brought her balloons and a get well card signed with the initials “SD” — for Sanhican Drive.
“From the SD Family,” the girl’s mother said.
Truitt thinks the young men realized her daughter was an innocent bystander and were trying to apologize in some small way.
“I think they feel bad about it, and that’s why,” she said.
Contact Alex Zdan at azdan@njtimes.com or (609) 989-5705.
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