Mom shot dead, daughter, 5, injured in SW Philly

A 31-YEAR-OLD woman was shot dead Tuesday and her 5-year-old daughter was grazed by a bullet, but the intended target of the gunfire was not injured in the Southwest Philly shooting.

About 4:10 p.m. Alisa Canty of Delaware came to pick up her 20-year-old boyfriend, who lives in a North Philadelphia halfway house, at his mother's house on Theodore Street near Island Avenue in Eastwick, police said.

Shots were fired after the man walked out of the house and down the stairs toward the sidewalk.

"As he comes down the stairwell - we believe he may have been in the car now - shots ring out at the car," said Lt. John Walker of the Southwest Detective Division.

The woman tried to evade the the gunfire but was shot once in her chest, police said. "She's able to reverse the car at a high rate of speed," Walker said. "The car strikes a home. Shots continue."

She was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and pronounced dead at 4:32 p.m. Her daughter was listed in stable condition Tuesday night at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, police said.

The shooting left Theodore Street littered with 23 shell casings and seven other pieces of ballistic evidence.

The motive behind the shooting was unclear. Police said that Canty's boyfriend was the intended target and had recently been released from prison. He was brought in for questioning but not identified, and police were not immediately sure of his criminal history.

"We did find some heroin," Walker said. "Heroin was dumped on the back end of the car. We're not sure if it was dumped by anyone involved in this investigation, but obviously we're looking into that now."

Bill Mehok, who lives nearby, said his wife was picking up their son from a babysitter's house on Theodore Street and had just put him in the car when the shots rang out.

"Anybody could have been walking down the street," he said Tuesday night, looking on as police investigated. "How do we stop it? We can't stop it as long as there's drugs in the neighborhood."

Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey was also on the scene as homicide detectives began interviewing neighbors.

"It's stupid, it's ignorant but we've got a lot of ignorant people with guns here," he said. "They absolutey do not care, and people do not understand that."

Contact Phillip Lucas at lucasp@phillynews.com or 215-854-5914. Follow him on Twitter @UnPhiltered. Read his blog at PhillyConfidential.com.