10-Year-Old Shot in Brooklyn Is Norwegian Tourist, Second Foreigner To Catch Borough Flak in a Week

April 5, 2012 Brooklyn Eagle Staff
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Maybe New York City tourists should just stick to Manhattan. The 10-year-old boy wounded by a stray bullet in Williamsburg Monday night turns out to be a Norwegian tourist who came to Brooklyn to visit his dad, according to the New York Post, which means that Monday’s shooting marked the second time in less than a week that a visiting foreigner was welcomed to the borough with an errant gunshot.
 
Josef Partapuoli, the Norwegian boy who absorbed the collateral damage, seems to be taking his Brooklyn initiation in stride. After being treated at Bellevue Hospital for a flesh wound to the side of his abdomen, he has decided to stay in the city until Friday to finish his planned sight-seeing, already demonstrating the dogged resolve of a seasoned New Yorker to get his money’s worth.
 
Partapouli’s injury came at around 11 p.m. Monday when an altercation among a group of teens in a bodega at the corner of Broadway and Hooper Street erupted onto the street and ended with two apparently wild shots being fired, one of which hit Partapouli as he headed southeast with his dad on Broadway. The suspected shooter, believed by police to be a slim black or Hispanic male, about 5-foot-11 and 165 pounds, was last seen wearing a grey hooded sweatshirt and black or blue pants before fleeing the scene of the shooting in a late-model gray or silver Infiniti, according to the Post.
 
On March 29, a Japanese tourist also experienced the largesse of Brooklyn’s loose-cannon welcoming committee, which evidently includes police officers and bodega bandits alike. The woman was sleeping on a friend’s couch when a narcotics cop who was embroiled in a heated drug raid in the apartment above her accidentally fired his gun through the floor and grazed her arm with the bullet.
 
After being briefly hospitalized, she received a police escort to her same-day flight out of Kennedy airport, according to the Huffington Post. But the Eagle would understand if the increased police presence didn’t completely calm her nerves. Y’all come back now. 

 —Eli MacKinnon
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