That’s one tough second-grader.
Eight-year-old Armando Bigo didn’t even cry after getting shot in the shoulder Tuesday night by a punk who fired into a Bronx bodega, the store’s owner told The Post.
“That’s a tough little kid,” said Mahmood Abdulrub, the manager of Papa Yala’s Deli & Grocery. “He never screamed or cried – he was a very brave boy.”
Armando and his mom, Ely Flores, had gone to the Randall Avenue bodega to buy potato chips around 8:15 p.m. when an armed bicyclist fired one shot into the storefront.
A shocking surveillance video shows the tough-as-nails tyke checking out a rack of potato chips an instant before getting struck by the bullet.
“I was screaming hysterically, and he said, ‘Mami, calm down, why are you crying, Mami?” said the boy’s mom, Ely Flores. “I said, ‘Baby, because you got shot.”
Abdulrub, who was working the cash register, said the boy and his mom had been in the store for less than two minutes when the shot ripped through the front door.
Sources said the cyclist’s bullet was aimed at one of the other patrons in the bodega, but it slammed into Armando’s left shoulder. The boy barely whimpered.
“He walked up to me holding his left shoulder and that’s when we noticed he’d been shot,” Abdulrub said.
As the boy’s mom screamed in horror, the shopkeeper sat Armando down on a milk crate and applied pressure to his gunshot wound.
“The only time he said ‘Ouch’ was when I applied pressure,” Abdulrub said. “Then he said, ‘Thank you, mister.’”
The second-grader at PS 170 in the Bronx even apologized for spilling blood on the bodega’s floor, and asked Abdulrub for permission to spit in front of his store.
“He was very polite and I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, kid, spit all you want,’” Abdulrub said.
The bullet fractured a rib and a bone in Armando’s spine, Flores said. He is in stable condition at Jacobi Hospital with bleeding into his lungs, his mom said.
The injuries are not considered life-threatening.
“He felt the shock go across from one arm to the other,” Flores said.
Inside the hospital, the sedated boy was finally giving in to a little fear, his mom said.
“He wants to stay inside,” said Flores, an out-of-work home-health aide.
The gunman is still on the loose after furiously pedaling away from the bodega on Randall Avenue.
“I don’t know who it is,” Flores said of the cowardly triggerman. “I don’t know what to think.”
Abdulrub said he was awed by the bravery Armando mustered after being shot.
“The only thing I kept thinking was, ‘Why did this have to happen to a kid?’” Abdulrub said. “It’s always the innocent ones that get hurt.”
Additional reporting by Larry Celona