A 9-year-old boy was shot in the face during a drive-by as he slept inside his Miami home Friday morning.
"It's a sad situation when a child can't be a child, when at 3:00 in the morning a kid can't sleep comfortably in his bed," said Miami Police spokesman Delrish Moss.
Investigators say a light-colored SUV drove down the 800 block of 55th Terrace in Liberty City and sprayed the house with bullets, Local10 reports.
"I heard about 30 rapid gunshots, they went bop, bop, bop, bop, real rapid, about 30 of them," said a neighbor.
One of those bullets reportedly struck the boy in the cheek at an angle. He was rushed to Ryder Trauma Center in serious condition, police said.
Four other children sleeping inside the home were unharmed.
"Initially we thought because of the amount of blood that another child may have been hit because it was a chaotic scene," Moss told NBC6.
Several other children have been shot in recent weeks in Miami-Dade County, the bullets believed meant for other people. In nearby Miami Gardens, an 11-year-old girl was shot last week by a gunman who fired into her home; 8th-grader Nevilisha Francis was shot while talking on the phone inside her house on October 21; and 12-year-old Tequila Forshee was tragically killed by a bullet to the head while she was getting her hair braided for the first day of school in her grandmother's living room.