Concord 13-year-old hit by stray bullet last year on the road to recovery

CONCORD, N.C. — The life of a 13-year-old girl was forever changed by a single bullet.

Concord teen Aalayah Fulmore was asleep in bed when stray gunfire nearly took her life. More than a year later, we’re hearing from her, as well as her family and the first responders who kept her alive.

The 911 call recording captured the moment tragedy struck.

“Hey I need 911, there’s something wrong with my daughter,” Stacy Fulmore says.

“What’s going on with her?” the dispatcher asks.

Just after 3 a.m. on July 8, 2022, Stacy Fulmore found her 13-year-old daughter in bed bleeding. She had no idea why.

“She wasn’t talking,” Fulmore told “ABC News Nightline.” “It was just like she was turning blue.”

Luckily, two officers were close by and got there quickly.

“I saw she had a gunshot wound to her stomach. And I knew I had to do something,” Sgt. Larry Frye said. “I put gloves on. I held pressure to the wound.”

You can hear the frantic moments officers arrived via their body camera footage.

“Aalayah, how old are you baby? Talk to me. Talk to me.”

“Every tiny second counts,” Dep. Matthew Twigger told “Nightline.” “Your job was to save 10 seconds, and then the EMS job saving 10 seconds. The surgeon has 20 seconds to play with to be able to save someone’s life.”

They’d later learn gunfire had erupted outside the Fulmores’ apartment. Aalayah spoke about what happened that night from her perspective.

“I was going to sleep, and then it was like a (noise) boy. He was outside, arguing it was so loud. Like, they were just cussing, then shots just started happening,” she said. “I just felt something go through my stomach, hopped up, ran.”

More than 30 bullets went flying through their home that night. One of them hit the 13-year old girl.

“There was a very high risk that she was not going to survive her initial injuries,” said Dr. Dwight Bailey, a specialty medical director at Levine Children’s Hospital.

“They was telling us, ‘look, your daughter is very sick,’” Stacy Fulmore said. “Like, they were pretty much saying she’s not going to make it ‘cause the more blood they gave her, the more blood she bled out.”

A single bullet left a trail of destruction inside her body, ricocheting from organ to organ, tearing through her intestines, colon, and the main artery carrying blood to her legs. Her heart stopped twice en route to her first emergency surgery.

“I counted around 20, 26 surgeries that she has had in total,” said Dr William Miles. “And about two thirds of those occurred in the first week.”

Doctors call her survival miraculous, but the road to recovery has been long. Doctors couldn’t remove the bullet and she’s waiting on yet another surgery to help fix her leg.

“Walk. That’s what I’ve been wanting to do for the longest,” Aalayah said.

Authorities have not named a suspect in the shooting.

Thanks to lifesaving care, Aalayah and her family have a future to plan for once more.

“I’m ready to get my first job at 14,” she told “Nightline.”

Aalayah’s family said her medical bills are more than half a million dollars and counting. They’ve been relying on a GoFundMe to help cover them. Click here to contribute.

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