Wounded Camden woman recounts shooting

Ms. Nettie got back onto her usual perch on her porch Monday, hours after stray bullets grazed her.

But this time, Ms. Nettie, as she is known in the neighborhood, looked around first. Then she stepped back to catch a breeze wafting by her relatively quiet street corner in North Camden.

"I got God with me. He protected me through this," said Nettie B., a 62-year-old Savannah, Ga., native who declined to give her entire last name.

Ms. Nettie, who has lived in the home since 1956, was caught in gunfire around 10:30 p.m. Sunday. Shots by a man wearing a mask hit her above the right kneecap, in the back of a shoulder, and on her scalp.

"It shook me up. My blood pressure went up. Scared me," she said.

Her ordeal offers a glimpse of how violence unsettles hardworking residents who are trying to improve neighborhoods like North Camden, which are overrun with vacant lots and abandoned homes.

"This is crazy," said Tashia Collins, 25, Ms. Nettie's granddaughter, and a Rowan University senior and criminal justice major. "You can't just sit on your porch."

A bullet scraped the lavender-colored brick of Ms. Nettie's rowhouse, just below the front window of the living room. Two bullets hit the exterior wall of a nearby home, next to a fenced-in playground and garden the family created.

Ms. Nettie's daughter, Donna Cosby, said: "All we're trying to do is be humble and live."

"I'm all right," Ms. Nettie said. "That's what counts. I had some angels watching over me."

Here's what Ms. Nettie recalls about the shooting:

Sometime after 10 p.m., while sitting on her porch, she saw a man wearing a ski mask, hat, and a long-sleeved shirt walking casually down Erie Street toward Fourth Street. At the corner, he opened fire in the direction of another man standing feet away. The intended victim ran down Erie, past Ms. Nettie's home.

She stumbled into the house. She didn't know she had been hit until she showed Collins her knee. Ms. Nettie was treated at Cooper University Hospital late Sunday.

The man, whom police are still seeking, fired about six times, Ms. Nettie said. Authorities said she wasn't the target.

Three generations have lived in the family's two rowhouses at Fourth and Erie Streets. Ms. Nettie's parents bought one of the homes in 1956 and the other years later. They were the first black family on the block, she said.

"Her house has always been full of family and friends," said the Rev. Margaret E. Herz-Lane, former pastor of Grace Lutheran Church, which Ms. Nettie has attended for at least two decades.

The community has changed since then, Ms. Nettie said. It is littered with empty lots. Suburbanites travel to North Camden to buy drugs. There once were fireworks at Pyne Poynt Park, which residents and the city are now working to clean up.

Ms. Nettie's family said it recently bought two abandoned lots on her block and turned them into a garden and playground for neighborhood children.

Flowers bloom in a garden neatly bordered by bricks that line a fence the family put up. There are a swing set and an aboveground pool.

"All we wanted to do was bring some life, something to see other than a vacant lot," said Ms. Nettie, who worked for two decades at an auto-parts factory.

Now retired from an assisted living facility, Ms. Nettie plans to return to Savannah - where her mother, sisters, and a brother live - in time for Sept. 15, her and her 88-year-old mother's birthday.

The shooting hasn't changed her plans.

Anyone with information is being asked to contact Camden Police Detective Shawn Donlon at 856-757-7420. The Citizens' Crime Commission is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the shooter. Call its tip line at 215-345-8477.