Canadian baby delivered after mother shot

SHOOTINGS  and street assassinations are  daily fodder for Panama’s tabloids and are largely ignored by La Prensa , La Estrella and Panama America.

But a   drive by shooting  of a pregnant mother  in Toronto, still regarded as  home by  many Canadian expats and ranked  by The Economist as the eighth safest major city in the world, and the safest major city in North America, has sent shock waves through  a city where  19  homicides in the first five months in a population of nearly 7 million was listed as a 216.8 percent increase over the same period in the previous year.

Candice Bobb. 35  was killed in the  shooting and her   five months baby was delivered via emergency C-section  CTV reports. She was a passenger in a car that was shot at several times from a passing vehicle when the driver stopped to drop off another passenger. “It’s a travesty,” Mayor John Tory, told  the National Post. “My heart goes out in particular to her baby. No baby should come into this world without a mother.”

“We’re all kind of in shock,” said   Toronto Police Superintendent Ron Taverner. “The whole city is outraged” The baby was in stable condition on Monday, but experts say that any baby out of the womb so early faces very tough odds, reports  the Toronto Star reports.. Babies born at “less than 22 to 23 weeks don’t have a realistic shot of survival” because their lungs are so immature, said  a Hospital for Sick Children neonatologist. But “each baby is an individual in her own right. “Some babies do a little bit better than the predicted probability and other babies do worse.”