Carter at Work Near Site of Shooting

Gunshots from a passing car wounded one man slightly Monday at an inner-city construction site where former President Jimmy Carter is leading some 400 Habitat for Humanity volunteers in a weeklong project to build 14 low-income houses.

Police said the shots came from a light blue car that was speeding by on one of Liberty City’s main thoroughfares and were not intended for Carter or any of the Habitat volunteers.

A bullet creased the head of Pat Morris, 34, who was helping make lunchtime sandwiches in a large tent pitched in a park adjacent to the construction site. “At first I thought it was a car backfire,” said Barbara Scott, a Methodist minister standing next to Morris. “But the noise kept coming, and then I saw that I had a piece of Pat’s hair in my hand and his blood all over me.”

Scott, who is from suburban Coral Gables, said that as it dawned on her what had happened, she and Morris looked around the large tent and saw that several women from a neighborhood beauticians’ association, also working on lunch preparations, had taken cover underneath the tables.

“We live with this all the time,” Marshall Davis, director of an adjacent cultural arts center, later said of the shooting.

Morris, after being treated at the scene, said he would return to work at the project today.

Carter was about a block away, working on one of the houses, when the shots were fired. He called the incident “unfortunate.”

Although Carter and Habitat officials downplayed the incident, a shooting just four hours into what is called the Jimmy Carter Work Project clearly alarmed those who worry about Miami’s image as a violence-prone city.

Miami Herald Publisher David Lawrence, who was wielding a hammer after raising some $58,000 for the project through appeals in his Sunday column, said, “This is painful for Miami, and just something else we’ll have to overcome.”