3-year-old Lovely Toney was shot in August. Now she's thriving.

When Lovely Toney's not at preschool or burning off energy in her new backyard in Mastic, she's curling up to mom and dad for attention, tinkering with her Play-Doh and Legos, or watching “Peppa Pig.”

While that might be a typical way for a 3-year-old to spend her day, the Toney family views those simple pleasures as a “miracle” following a late summer and early fall spent in a hospital bed, where Lovely underwent multiple surgeries after being struck by a stray bullet that pierced a wall in her family's former apartment in Ridge.

“Ultimately, thankfully, despite all of the injuries she has sustained, she is actually doing quite well,” said Dr. James Schneider, chief of the critical care unit at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in Queens.

In a police precinct with just one prior active shooter call in the past three years, the 3-year-old was a victim in the second.

'Angels' outside the house

James Toney, Lovely's dad, can’t bring himself to watch the police body-camera footage from the night Lovely was shot.

It’s not so much the idea of seeing the two of them, he on his knees with Lovely bleeding in his arms, that troubles him. He’s stopped instead by the sound of his voice as he desperately pleads for someone, anyone, to come help his daughter, who moments earlier was bouncing on a bed without a thought of what might come through their apartment walls.

I didn’t even know I had a voice like that ... It’s kind of raw for me.

—James Toney

“I didn’t even know I had a voice like that,” Toney says of his urgent yell on the footage released by Suffolk County police. “I gotta stop it at hearing myself scream like that. It’s kind of raw for me.”

Because the police were Gary Jones' intended target when he fired several rounds, including the one that injured Lovely, the response time to aid the child can be measured in seconds.

As he stepped through the doorway of his Strathmore Ridge apartment, Toney did not know police were already outside.

The body-camera footage opens with the shadow of an officer bouncing off the freshly cut grass outside the unit on Ticonderoga Court as he rushes to Toney, who can be heard repeatedly yelling, “My daughter!”

Jones was being investigated as a suspect in the June shooting death of his girlfriend, Shayna Staton, in Central Islip. The final shot Jones fired was a bullet to the head, ending his own life. Police discovered that more than four hours later, when they sent a robot equipped with video technology into the apartment to make certain the standoff was over.

Then-Suffolk Police Commissioner Rodney K. Harrison credited Det. Luis Cabrera of the homicide unit and Officer Cristian Hernandez of the Seventh Precinct with saving Lovely’s life.

A second body-camera video showed them rushing her into Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead, where she was treated before being quickly transported to the opposite end of Long Island, to Cohen.

“I have a grandson that is 3 years old,” Harrison said during a news conference the day after the shooting. “I can’t imagine going through that same situation, being out there and seeing that baby, a victim of a gunshot wound, the trauma that must have put in this family.”

Through the department’s public information office, Cabrera and Hernandez declined to be interviewed.

When asked about their lifesaving actions the following day, Toney called the officers “angels,” the first of several the family has encountered in the four months since.

The path to recovery

The morning after she was shot, Lovely was declared by police and hospital officials to be in stable condition.

She underwent emergency surgery after doctors recognized the bullet struck part of her liver and searched for additional bullet fragments before closing her wounds three days after she was shot.

Within days, Lovely, who had been sedated and hooked up to a machine to help her breathing, was awake and breathing on her own.

But the path to recovery came with some ups and downs, Schneider said.

Lovely ultimately would need multiple surgeries to fix her injured liver, and two more on her hand. She would develop an abscess in her abdomen near the site of the gunshot wound, and pain in her leg from the initial “lifesaving care” she received, he said.

Adolescent gunshot wounds were once considered rare, but Schneider said he and other doctors are forced to treat such victims at a growing rate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention categorizes gun violence as the leading cause of death for children between ages 1 and 19.

“The data shows incidents of gun-related injuries to kids just continues to slowly increase,” Schneider said. “We are unfortunately seeing it more often than, let's say, 20 years ago, when I started in this business.”

The data shows incidents of gun-related injuries to kids just continues to slowly increase.

—Dr. James Schneider, chief of the critical care unit at Cohen Children’s Medical Center

Kids, however, also tend to be healthier, their bodies more resilient to trauma, the doctor said. He credits overall good health and resilience with being a major factor in Lovely's recovery.

“This is just a really good example of how gun violence is becoming more of a problem in our community, to how innocent people, including children, are victims of this,” Schneider said. “But then, most important, from my perspective, is when treated quickly in the appropriate environments with a wonderful team of experts, kids can thankfully have a good outcome, if they're only lucky enough to have been injured in certain places.”

For Lovely, the difference between life and death may have been a matter of inches, the doctor said.

Softening the blow of having their daughter treated two counties away was support that Lovely’s family, which includes 7-year-old James, received from the Ronald McDonald House Charities. The family was housed and fed in the Ronald McDonald House in New Hyde Park, which neighbors the hospital where Lovely stayed until late October, eliminating the need for them to drive back and forth.

“We were able to just get right up and head over there,” mom Cathy Serrano said, adding they otherwise would have spent many nights sleeping in chairs next to her hospital bed to avoid the 100-mile round-trip commute.

Toney also credited cousin Catherine Bright with organizing a crowdsourcing campaign that helped the family avoid the financial impact of medical and moving expenses.

A new place to call home

Through the back wall of the Toney family’s newly rented house in Mastic is a few thousand square feet of fenced yard. There’s plenty of room for a growing 3-year-old to jump around in the leaves with her big brother or slide down a playset they now call their own.

For Serrano, the family’s new residence in Mastic is a place free from the emotional scars that formed in a place they previously loved, where they had family in the same development and always got along with the people around them. They’ve traded shared walls for freshly painted ones 8½ miles from the spackle-covered bullet holes that are a reminder of that frightening late summer night.

“It was just very stressful,” Serrano said of returning home from New Hyde Park. “It was hard to sleep, because you never know what's gonna happen, having that bad memory and that nightmare just going in your head over and over because you're still in the same place.”

Lovely’s actual scars are healing, too. You might strain to notice the one on her left hand, the initial entry point for the bullet. There are no more wires monitoring her. The doctor’s visits are infrequent.

She's definitely a miracle baby.

—Cathy Serrano

In the last week of November, Serrano wiped tears from her brown eyes as she watched Lovely get driven away on a school bus to preschool for the first time.

The first thing Serrano did when Lovely returned home that Thursday afternoon was reach into her bright pink backpack to pull out the day’s work, a coloring sheet covered in strokes of blue and red crayon.

“Aww, look at this,” the proud mom said as she held the piece of paper up to her smiling face.

By late November, families are usually deep into their routines of sending kids off to school. The past few months for Lovely and her family have been anything but typical.

As her classmates at Just Kids in Middle Island were getting to know each other back in September, Lovely's focus was on something much more urgent — survival.

“They said if that bullet was an inch over it would have hit her spine,” Serrano said.

“She's definitely a miracle baby.”

By Grant Parpan

grant.parpan@newsday.com@GrantParpan

Grant Parpan covers Suffolk County courts and federal courts for Newsday. A Long Island native, he joined Newsday in 2022.