A brave Bronx mom was gunned down in the hallway outside her apartment when she dashed from her home to draw a crazed female intruder away from her helpless 2-year-old son, a witness said yesterday.
Angelica Grullon, 25, bolted from her fourth-floor Fordham apartment after a woman she let into her apartment to use the bathroom pulled a gun and demanded cash.
“She ran to protect her son,” said the witness, who was in the apartment at the time but asked her name not be revealed. “It’s a miracle that [the shooter] left me and the baby alive.”
The gun-toting maniac, who “looked like drug addict,” followed Grullon into the hallway firing wildly – with bullets going into the floor and ceiling – before striking her in the neck, head and chest. The killer then fled in a livery cab.
Investigators tracked down the livery cabdriver and were interviewing him yesterday.
Cops were still looking for the suspect, a 5-foot-5 Hispanic female who was caught on a building security camera with her accomplice, a Hispanic man in a black hooded sweatshirt who stood lookout in the vestibule and rode off with her in the cab.
Grullon, a medical assistant for a Manhattan podiatrist, had let the woman in at around 6 p.m. Thursday. As she walked her toward the bathroom, the woman asked for a glass of water. When Grullon returned, the mystery woman had gone into the little boy’s toy-filled room and pulled a gun.
“I just want money! Give me anything! Give me jewelry!” the woman demanded as she grabbed Grullon by the neck.
Grullon yelled out to her pal in the living room, “Please, my baby!” and the friend scooped the boy, Jeremiah, off the couch, ran into the bedroom and locked the door.
Grullon then made a dash for the door with the wild-eyed thief behind her.
“Somebody, please help me,” neighbor Monique Jordan, 24, heard Grullon say in a terrified whisper.
“You thought I was going to let you get away with it just like that!” the shooter reportedly yelled before opening fire, leaving Grullon dead in the hallway.
“She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t even breathing,” Jordan said.
Grullon’s heartbroken family described her as a dedicated mother and devout churchgoer.
“All she did was work very hard for her son. She was a great daughter. She wasn’t a girl from the street. She was not a troublemaker,” said her mother, Miriam Rodriguez.
Her brother, Luis Cardona, said his sister let the woman in only because she had asked for help.
“You can’t be good these days with people,” he said. “Look what happened to my sister. My sister had no enemies.”
Additional reporting by Perry Chiaramonte