DETROIT FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
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Bullet holes are visible on Monday, July 11, 2011, in the windows of the apartment where a 3-year-old Detroit girl was shot and killed by a stray bullet on July 10. / MIKE BROOKBANK/DFP
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Bullet holes are visible on Monday, July 11, 2011, in the windows of the apartment where a 3-year-old Detroit girl was shot and killed by a stray bullet on July 10. / MIKE BROOKBANK / DFP
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Aerie Berry / Family photo
A fight was brewing.
And the mother of a 3-year-old girl and a couple of relatives who were visiting in the 3100 block of Canton, near Mack Avenue and East Grand Boulevard, decided to leave.
They got into their green Oldsmobile and turned the key, but the car wouldn’t start, so they went back in the house.
About a half-hour later, bullets shattered the front window of the home, and 3-year-old Aerie Berry was dead, according to Detroit police.
Detroit Police spokeswoman Sgt. Eren Stephens said today no one was in custody in connection with the crime.
"We would have been over here if the car would have moved," Aerie's aunt, Sydney Stewart, 19, who lives with the toddler and her parents, said from her mother's home near East Outer Drive and Dickerson this afternoon. "I was just like, 'Oh well,' and we went back in the house. We didn't think they'd come back shooting. Everything had calmed down."
Stewart said she was sitting on the floor in front of the window with Aerie right in front of her when they heard what sounded like fireworks at 9:40 p.m. Sunday. The toddler had just put away her chair from her child-sized Mickey Mouse table and was headed to bed.
"The shots fired and she took off running before I could grab her," Stewart said. "I turned around and she was already laying on the floor. She don't like fireworks so she run away from them -- she tried to run to her mama's room. And when I saw her laying there, I called my sister and her father. And they came out and he grabbed her and ran into the kitchen because they were still shooting."
Stewart says bluntly that she can't believe a petty disagreement ended with her niece dead.
"It was stupid," Stewart said, adding that she heard the disagreement began over a stolen phone. "It just got out of hand."
Canton Street resident Walter Taylor, 18, said he was involved in the fight, which he said started over who was going to call a girl his brother and another neighbor met Sunday afternoon at a neighborhood store.
With his arm wrapped in a bandage where he said he was hit by a baseball bat, Taylor said today that he regrets being involved in the fight in the first place.
His mother, Terea Taylor, 45, whose son Walter, 18, said she’s afraid now about whether the shooters will return – and whether her family will be safe.
“I’m afraid to even be out here,” Terea Taylor said, sitting on her stoop, across a vacant lot from where her 3-year-old neighbor died. “If you’re going to fight, fight. Don’t call your boys in. You don’t bring guns into it.”
She also said she’s haunted by visions of the little girl walking up the street with her family, smiling at neighbors as she held her mother’s hand. And Taylor said she feels horrible for the girl’s mother.
“I can’t even imagine what she is going through for nothing,” Terea Taylor said.
And she said she has a message for the shooter.
“You won,” she said. “You scared us. You won. Can we be left in peace? That’s all I’m asking now is to be left in peace."
Video at link: http://www.freep.com/article/20110711/NEWS01/110711003/Aerie-3-her-family-tried-leave-volatile-neighborhood-just-before-she-fatally-shot?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE