10-year-old boy shot at Kansas City Super Bowl parade recovering after bullet narrowly misses lungs, organs

A 10-year-old boy who took a bullet during the Kansas City shooting earlier this week is recovering with a small flesh wound. The bullet was inches from his lungs and other vital organs.  

Samuel Arellano, 10, told the Independent in an interview, “When I heard the gunshots, I hid." Samuel had been attending the parade with his grandfather, aunt, and uncle. 

"I fell to the ground and then hid behind a trash can.” 

"It felt like getting stabbed," he told local outlet KSBH. "It could've been inches from my whole future." 

The boy was holding his side after the injury but was physically able to walk around without too much trouble. When Samuel's mother Aby called his grandfather, she asked if anyone had been hit. The grandfather did not think any of them were hit by the bullet spray.  

When Aby went to pick him up, he was holding his rib cage. She thought he had only been trampled during the chaos. It was only after they got home that the family made the discovery that Samuel had been shot.  

"He kept saying that he’d been hit, but at the same time, I feel like he himself didn’t believe it … in that mind of shock,” his aunt, Eunice Salas said. “We feel like it was a miracle, too, because he was not bleeding. He has the wound, but there was no blood or nothing." 

The boy was taken to Mercy Children’s Hospital where doctors took bullet fragments out of the wound. Samuel told reporters that he was upset that a “great experience” was ruined by the shooting. 

“I’m grateful with God, because he gave my son a second chance at life,” Samuel's mother said. “It was a long night, we couldn’t sleep, but thank God he’s with us.”