Stray Bullet Strikes Italian Boy on New Year's Eve at Miami Restaurant

Italian restaurant shooting scene from The Godfather.

​First you get hit with parking, then with tax and tip, and then by a bullet?

In Miami's Design District, anything is possible.

A 6-year-old Italian tourist ringing in the new year with his family at Mai Tardi restaurant was struck by a bullet that went into his chest, through one lung, and stopped close to his heart.

It was most likely a "celebratory bullet" falling to earth. Miami custom is to shoot guns into the air on joyous occasions. The bullet might have been fired from as far as two miles away from where it landed.

Mai Tardi's two-mile radius includes parts of Little Haiti, Liberty City, Overtown, and the Biscayne corridor, some of Miami's roughest neighborhoods, but the bullet might have come from anywhere or anybody.

Little Andrea Fregonese, the shooting victim, is alive. He was released from intensive care at Jackson this past Sunday. No word on what caliber bullet struck the boy, but click here for an example of the international reaction to the incident from the Italian press. Click here to copy/paste that text into a bad English translation if you don't speak Italian.