Shooting hits home for mom of victim: ‘We’re getting out of here. This city is getting crazy.’

When she got word that her son had been shot, Ashley Hunter drove to the hospital so fast that she arrived there before her son.

There, she gasped as a patrol car pulled up with a wounded teen who looked “lifeless,” she said. As he heard the cries and wails of this boy’s mother, an ambulance arrived at the hospital bay. When the doors opened, she saw her 15-year-old son, shoeless, wrapped in blankets, wounded in the stomach.

“Mom,” he said. “I love you.”

“Don’t talk that way,” Hunter said. “You’re going to be fine.”

After surgery, her son is hospitalized, but expected to recover from Tuesday’s gunfire after a football scrimmage at Roxborough High School. He was one of four teens wounded in the ambush. A fifth victim, Nicolas Elizalde, 14, was pronounced dead after police drove him to the hospital.

» READ MORE: What we know about the Roxborough High School shooting

Just back from her son’s bedside on Wednesday, Hunter, 34, a SEPTA bus driver, shook her head at the shock of what had befallen her son, a ninth grader at Roxborough High who loves “sports, video games, and music” and was a cornerback on the junior varsity squad. She asked that her son’s name be withheld for safety reasons.

“It’s surreal, for sure,” she said. “I’m just so numb to it. It’s happening every day. I feel for all victims, but when it’s your own, it hits harder.”

”We’re getting out of here,” she added. “This city is getting crazy.”

» READ MORE: How to talk to kids about the Roxborough High School shooting

By her son’s account to his mother, he was departing the 90-minute scrimmage among the squads from Roxborough, Northeast High, and Boys Latin Charter School when the shooters opened fire.

”He said he turned around and they jumped out of the car with gloves and they started shooting,” Hunter said. “He couldn’t even tell me why.”

Her son recalled one bullet striking the 14-year-old who was fatally hit, and others striking him and a friend at his side, 17, who was shot in the right arm and three times in his left leg. Another 14-year-old boy was shot once in his left thigh and a third 14-year-old was grazed by a bullet.

She said she was alarmed and mystified by the violence among teens.

”Everybody wants to be grown so bad. They want to be something they’re really not,” she said. “Everyone wants to make a name for themselves — until they end up in the hospital crying for mom.”