A stray bullet strikes a sleeping 4-year-old, and an Anchorage family struggles to regroup

The basement apartment in the Russian Jack neighborhood had problems: it flooded when it rained and Jessyca Francy said she once found someone getting high on meth in the shared laundry room.

But Francy, 39, was just happy to have a place she and her husband could afford with their hotel and restaurant jobs.

In recovery from a drug addiction that made a mess of her life and led to jail time, the $1,300-per-month apartment on San Roberto Avenue seemed like a decent next step as her family tried to stabilize their lives after leaving a transitional housing program.

Until last Wednesday.

That was when Francy came home early from her job at the front desk of a Ramada Inn around 11:15 p.m. and found something was not right in her apartment.

Her 17-year-old son, Ricky Watson, had been watching the younger children, a 10-month-old, 2-year-old and 4-year-old, as he often did while Francy and her husband worked at night.

It had been a routine evening, Watson said later: Dinner, movies and bedtime.

When Francy walked through the door, her 4-year-old daughter Hayley appeared to be asleep, face-down on the couch with the TV on. Hayley sometimes snuck out of her room to watch cartoons, so Francy wasn't alarmed. She decided to let her be.

But when she went to check in the room Hayley shared with 2-year-old Tyrion, she noticed a large blood stain on her daughter's empty bed.

Alarmed, Francy went to wake her daughter up and realized she was bleeding heavily from the upper leg.

Hayley seemed to be in shock. She told her mother something poked her, but Francy couldn't figure out what had injured the girl. Her husband rushed home and they wrapped the 4-year-old in a blanket and took her to the emergency room.

Doctors couldn't determine what had caused the wound to the child's thigh. Police were called.

Officers returned to the apartment to look around. At the apartment, underneath Hayley's toddler bed outfitted with a polka-dot comforter and sheets featuring dancing monkeys, police found a bullet.

The officers determined that Hayley "had been hit by bullet fragments, and that bullet had been fired from an apartment on the third floor directly above the apartment where the child lives," Anchorage police said in a news release. Police told the family the bullet was from a .45-caliber handgun.

Close calls involving bullets from neighboring apartments are not unheard of in Anchorage.

In 2011, the 2-year-old son of an Anchorage police officer was shot in the head in his East Anchorage home when a neighbor manipulating a handgun accidentally fired through a condominium wall. The boy was expected to recover.

In 2013, a woman sleeping with her husband and 1-year-old daughter survived being shot in the knee when a bullet came through the wall of their second-floor apartment in Mountain View.

In July, a bullet from a murder-suicide in an apartment also in Mountain View whizzed through the wall of the next door neighbors' kitchen.

Francy said she didn't really know her neighbors from the unit two stories above. She hasn't heard from police about the case for a few days.

"We have not been able to identify and charge the shooting suspect in this case at this time," Anchorage Police Department spokeswoman Jennifer Castro said Monday.

"It's one of many cases," Francy said.

Hayley spent two days in the hospital before being released. She refuses to go back inside the apartment, and has been staying with her godparents.

Doctors told Francy the bullet passed a quarter-inch from Hayley's femoral artery. Had she been sleeping an inch in either direction, the outcome would have been much worse.

"That's when I kind of lost it," Francy said. "What if she wasn't able to get out of bed? What if I hadn't checked on her on the couch? When your child gets hurt and you can't do anything to protect them it makes you feel inadequate."

Now the family is faced with finding a new place to live in a city that feels unforgiving and unsafe to Jessyca Francy.

"When you have a criminal history, bad credit and no rental history, it makes it almost impossible," she said. "Unless you want to go to another drug-infested nightmare like what we're trying to get out of right now."

The family is expanding their budget for housing to $1,500 a month in hopes of finding a suitable apartment in a different neighborhood. Francy's husband has taken on extra work to come up with the money. They'd like to return to Ketchikan, where they moved from six years ago, but can't until Francy completes probation.

All of that left the family at a McDonalds on Spenard Road Monday, trying to plot their next steps. They've started an online fundraising page for relocation expenses and to buy a new toddler mattress to replace the one stained with blood.

Hayley is up and running around, though she might need physical therapy. Her parents also want her to go to counseling, but aren't yet sure how they'll manage that.

A playful 4-year-old with long hair in a Minnie Mouse sweatshirt, Hayley said she remembered what happened Wednesday: A monster hurt her and a character from the movie "Monsters, Inc." chased it away.

"I was very brave," she said.