The family of a 6-year-old girl who was struck with a stray bullet while asleep at her Mexico City home early Saturday was preparing today to tell her that she lost her left eye.
In the days since Megan Garrido was shot while sleeping at home in the borough of Iztapalapa, the girl’s parents were unable to find the right words to break the news to their daughter.
In that context, staff from the psychology and psychiatry units at the National Pediatric Institute offered to be present during the difficult conversation and to support the girl’s parents.
Megan was expected to be fitted with an ocular prosthesis today and possibly even discharged from hospital.
However, returning to her normal routine will no doubt present difficulties.
“. . . Her hobby was reading and I don’t know if she will [be able to] continue to do it. She’s stable, she’s calm but she doesn’t know that she lost her eye,” Megan’s father told the newspaper Milenio.
Celestino Garrido said that neither he nor anyone else in his family heard any loud noises on Saturday morning that could have alerted them to the impending accident.
“We were sleeping, we didn’t hear any noises nearby but suddenly there was a sound like a stone on metal and that woke up my daughter. She was crying and her eye was bleeding. I picked her up and took her to the hospital,” he said.
Garrido said that his biggest concern now is finding the money to buy new ocular prostheses for Megan as she grows.
He conceded that it was “almost impossible” that the person responsible for firing the shot would be found but called on others to refrain from shooting aimlessly into the air, warning that the practice could have “fatal” consequences.
Residents of El Manto, the neighborhood where the family lives, told Milenio that gun shots are sometimes heard in the area, while one person said that a stray bullet once landed on his neighbor’s stovetop.
Mexico City Attorney General Ernestina Godoy said Sunday that an investigation into the incident that caused Megan’s injury had been opened, telling reporters that authorities were “looking into what was going on in the area around the El Manto neighborhood at that time.”
The day after the incident, a man was beaten to death inside an Iztapalapa apartment building in retaliation for repeatedly firing a weapon into the air.
Source: Milenio (sp)
