Lisa Miller

  • Home
  • About Lisa Miller
  • Contact Lisa
  • About “Heaven”
    • Praise for “Heaven”
  • Book Clubs

Heroes: Because Zurana Horton Took a Bullet to Save Her Daughter’s Life.

December 11, 2011 By Lisa Miller

She had just picked up 11-year-old Alexis, one of her twelve children, from school at Brownsville’s P.S. 298. They turned up Watkins Street and walked past the firehouse, on their way to retrieve another one of her girls. They had reached the Peanut Lucky Supermarket—where a sign in the window says “Welcome to Our Store” and graffiti scrawled on the exterior brick reads CRIP—when the shooting started. Rival gang members were having an argument, apparently over a cell phone, and at this moment, around 2:30 in the afternoon on Friday, October 21, the sidewalks still teeming with schoolchildren, one of them, standing on a rooftop, decided to resolve the dispute with a gun. An eyewitness would later tell reporters that when the kids heard the blasts, a lot of them seemed to freeze in place.

Exactly what happened next is foggy, but Kirsten John Foy, director of community affairs for the public advocate’s office, has pieced together this much: In the fractions of seconds after the shooting began, 34-year-old Zurana Horton gathered Alexis and another girl who was standing nearby in her arms. Placing herself in the line of fire, she hovered over them like a bird enveloping her chicks. “By all accounts there wasn’t enough time for her to make a decision about what to do,” says Foy. “It was an instinct.” The police say she probably saved her daughter’s life, as well as that of 11-year-old Cheanne McKnight. Horton was struck in the chest and the base of her neck and died from her wounds.

It’s human to wonder whether you’re the kind of person who would walk in front of bullets to save someone else. For most New Yorkers, that question remains fortunately hypothetical. But for Horton—­living in the projects, in Brownsville, where crime rates are some of the city’s very highest—it would always have been terribly real. When the day came, she gave her answer.

Filed Under: New York Magazine Tagged With: bullet, death, Lisa Miller, sacrifice

Lisa Miller

Lisa Miller

Lisa Miller is a staff writer at New York magazine. She is a former columnist for the Washington Post, former senior editor of Newsweek magazine, and author of "Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife."

About Lisa Miller

Lisa-Miller-Headshot

Lisa Miller is a staff writer at New York magazine. She is the former religion columnist for the Washington Post, former senior editor of Newsweek magazine, and author of "Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife."

In 2014, Lisa Miller was nominated for the National Magazine Award and featured in Best Magazine Writing of 2014.

read more...

NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARD

Lisa-Miller-Headshot

Recent Tweets

  • “It’s definitely the case that most people with schizophrenia do not commit violent crimes. It’s also true that peo… https://t.co/qknpGwsrkY January 18, 2023 2:44 pm
  • “Hospital is not prison. A person who has not been accused of a crime cannot be jailed." https://t.co/xboQYkrg3k January 18, 2023 2:42 pm
  • So the ER doctors, with few other options, often knowingly discharge people back onto the street. https://t.co/xboQYkrg3k January 18, 2023 2:41 pm
  • "Given the hard realities of living on the street, patients who are unsheltered frequently present a full slate of… https://t.co/m6jkKTod1H January 18, 2023 2:40 pm
  • “It made us feel like he was taking control of our lives,” she told me. https://t.co/n8gFpH4rC5 October 11, 2022 1:17 pm
  • https://www.twitter.com/lisaxmiller

Recent Posts

  • Children of Quarantine
  • My Therapists Were Right About Uncertainty
  • Why Did I Think She Wouldn’t Die?
  • The Making of a Molotov Cocktail
  • Two Weeks With Rachel Noerdlinger, the Movement’s Publicist

Copyright © 2023 Lisa Miller