Democratic mayoral frontrunner Eric Adams said Saturday he would personally donate $2,000 to help catch the brazen gunman who opened fire at a rival on a Bronx street, inches away from two terrified kids.

“I am not going back to the days where our babies were waking up to gunshots and not alarm clocks,” Adams said at a press conference at the site of Thursday’s shooting on Sheridan Avenue near Mt. Eden Parkway.

“So I am offering a personal reward to anyone who has information that would lead to apprehension and conviction of the individual who discharged those bullets at those babies. Because if he would do it to them, he would do it to your family members.”

Adams, a former cop and current Brooklyn borough president, said his donation comes on top of the NYPD’s reward of $3,500. He would directly pay a tipster whose information leads to the arrest and conviction of the shooter, his campaign said.

“This is New York. This is not a third world country that’s under some type of war-like zone,” said Adams, who is against efforts to defund the NYPD and wants to flood the subways with more cops.

The two children, a 10-year-old girl and her 5-year-old brother, miraculously escaped unharmed from the mayhem that began about 7 p.m. outside the Maria Pablito Deli & Grocery near their apartment building on Sheridan.

The kids went out to buy some candy with their parents when the gunman, wearing a black hoodie and black mask, began shooting at his target, who trampled the kids as he ran for his life. Yet the gunman kept shooting in a horrifying scene that stunned the city.

“When I heard the shots, I ducked. Everybody went down,” said bystander Victor Adames, 46, who is seen in the clip rushing to comfort the cowering kids.

“The kids were shaking. They were crying. I held both kids,” he said, putting both hands out. “I took them in the laundromat. The father was across the street. He ran and came and got them.”

Neighbors said the family was from the Dominican Republic and the dad is a cab driver.
A woman who works at the bodega said the kids came in daily to buy items, such as plantains, for their mom.

Another witness said the gunman jumped off the back of a scooter and started shooting at the 24-year-old victim, identified by police sources as Hassan Wright, before getting back on and taking off.

The 24-year-old victim, who was hit once in the back and once in each leg, was taken to nearby Bronx Lebanon Hospital, and is expected to survive, sources said.

Law enforcement sources said Wright is a gang member who had been injured in a 2014 shooting, and who had been arrested for shooting into a crowd in the Bronx in 2015.

Wright was hit once in the back and once in each leg, and was taken to Bronx Lebanon Hospital, and is expected to survive, sources said.

The shooting was front and center Saturday on the campaign trail in the last weekend before Tuesday’s primary.

“When I saw that video, all I could think about was the parents of those kids and the trauma that those kids were going to go through, being caught literally in the crossfire. This cannot be happening on the streets of New York,” Kathryn Garcia said during a joint appearance with Andrew Yang in the East Village.

Garcia, the former city sanitation commissioner, called for doubling the size of the NYPD’s gun-suppression unit and increasing gun buy backs.

Yang, who also wants to increase the gun-suppression unit, said he wanted to staff up precincts in neighborhoods with an increase in gun violence.

“As a parent, as a New Yorker, that video shocked and horrified me, and we have to put a stop to it. These things cannot happen on the streets of New York,” he said.

Maya Wiley, former counsel to Mayor de Blasio who wants to slash $1 billion from the NYPD’s budget, said during a Queens campaign stop that “We have to be outraged by every single shooting.”

“What I am listening to is all the folks who do crisis intervention and prevent guns from being shot in the first place,” she said.

The citywide shooting surge has hit the Bronx hardest of all the boroughs, with 211 incidents reported through June 13 compared to 97 during the same period last year — an increase of 118 percent.

And in Claremont, the neighborhood where Thursday’s horror erupted, shootings soared to 32 through June 13, compared to 13 during the same time period in 2020 — a galling 146 percent increase.

Even still, there was something different about this one.

A woman who was in the bodega with a 2-year-old when the pop of gunfire erupted has been crying ever since.

“He was in a little red cart,” she said of the boy, who wanted a bag of chips and juice. “I took him out of the cart and dragged him to the back of the store. He was crying.”

She continued: “I was crying until this morning.”

Additional reporting by Dean Balsamini, Jon Levine, Steven Vago, Melissa Klein, Tina Moore and Joe Marino