A blood-stained pillow, pictures, clothing and memories are all Cary Salmon has left of her five-year-old daughter who was hit by a stray bullet while fast asleep in her home at New Haven, Duhaney Park in St Andrew.

According to the 39-year-old mother, a barrage of loud explosions shattered the night silence about 1:00 am yesterday, causing her to take cover.

Salmon said she was at the door near her room checking on something for her 12-year-old daughter when the shooting started.

“I heard the shots, so I duck,” she told the Jamaica Observer.

Salmon explained that after the gunfire subsided, she was alerted by her 12-year-old daughter that her younger sister, Denique, had been shot.

“My older daughter called me and said, ‘Mommy, mommy look on Den Den’. When I look, I see blood coming out my baby mouth, her eyes pulping, so I called 119. They responded quickly and they grabbed my child and rushed her to children’s hospital. She was already gasping for her last breath and they pronounced her dead at 1:45 am,” Salmon related.

The distraught mother of three compared the spraying of bullets to the bursting of firecrackers heard during the Christmas season.

“I don’t even know what to call it, but from couple weeks ago there has been shooting in the community. The fact that the room was around the other side, I didn’t take her off the bed because I was saying that the shot wouldn’t reach around there, but I guess I was wrong,” she said.

“I am angry, I am bitter. It’s like somebody took my heart out and it’s on the ground beating and I can’t take it up,” the mother said.

Yesterday, Superintendent Kirk Ricketts, commanding officer for the St Andrew South police, told the Observer that the constabulary has identified a number of individuals who are believed to have been involved in the shooting.

“We have been trying to manage the space, in terms of the level of violence, and we have had some success in recent times. The gangs, I believe, are not as vibrant in this particular space as they once were and this situation this morning was an unfortunate situation. We have already incorporated a number of operational responses and you will see that as we go along,” he said.

He added that the early morning incident was a “continuation” of gang warfare in the area of late.

“This particular area has been having a problem with gang activities over a period of time, so this morning was just a continuation of what we have been seeing. Sometime after 1:00 am two warring factions went at it, exchanging gunfire and, of course, the terrible tragedy happened where a round went into a home and killed five-year-old Denique Salmon in her sleep,” he said.

“It’s really something that is unexplainable that we could have these criminals moving through the community at that time of the morning and engaging in this kind of reckless behaviour that would have caused the death of a child,” he added, noting that with the help of residents, a multiple-modality approach is needed to fight these kinds of crimes.

Yesterday evening when the Observer contacted the superintendent for an update, he said the police “are still investigating”.