Three residences struck by bullets in Monday night’s gunfire near Rambling Lane illustrate how close the island came to losing a bystander to a stray shot.

The bullet that punched through the shutter and kitchen window of one home flew into a hangout popular with the area’s children, residents said.

The pursuit of a man by two gunmen through the tight-packed neighbourhood left another home with a bullet lodged in its front door, while a third ricocheted off someone else’s door upstairs.

“My husband had just been there at the kitchen table — I would have been a widow,” said a woman at the first house.

The shot bounced off her microwave, used minutes earlier by a neighbour.

Believing there had been an explosion, she found herself stepping on glass. Feeling heat under her foot, she discovered a bullet.

“This is disgusting,” she said. “Why shoot here, knowing children are always in this house? Then we found out it was guys chasing somebody.”

Interjected Rolfe Commissiong, MP for the area: “We are truly this close to an innocent person being murdered.”

The Royal Gazette spoke anonymously with residents, several of whom asked for regular discreet passes by police through a neighbourhood marred by an aggressive outside element.

“If this had happened 16 years ago, I would have packed up and gone,” the woman said. “But I don’t have trouble with people here. It’s outsiders.

“I’m definitely worried this could happen again. My husband couldn’t sleep that night. Everyone was shaken. It’s just crazy.”

Another woman near by believes there could still be a bullet lodged inside her door.

Shortly before 11pm on Monday, as she watched TV from bed, five shots blasted outside.

“Oh my God — we thought they were inside the house, it was so loud,” she said.

She has been left sleepless and jittery since, jumping at sudden noises.

Mr Commissiong described the area as “a series of interlocking neighbourhoods that have almost been under siege”, pointing to shots fired in May on Curving Avenue, and the June 8 shooting of a 21-year-old man on Middletown Drive.

“I keep trying to convey that we have to look at the underlying causes that are informing these gruesome realities,” the Pembroke South East MP said.

“These factors are causing generation after generation to be caught up in a lifestyle that is increasingly destructive. And I want the Bermudian people to understand that we can’t incarcerate or prosecute our way out.”

A longstanding resident described young men strange to the neighbourhood threatening to shoot him over even mild complaints, such as people cutting through his yard.

“I just keep to my own business,” he said.

Mr Commissiong said the island badly needed to address the roots of its troubled young men.

“We have the socioeconomic marginalisation of significant numbers of working-class black men, which is accompanied by structural racism. We see the same factors in the United States and other countries scarred by racial segregation and racism. It’s that mix where these roads meet where we see these outcomes on a multigenerational basis.”

Black men are at the bottom of the wage scale, he said, concentrated in low paying jobs and afflicted by the drug trade, with “significantly lower” life expectancy and poor educational outcomes.

“This is a diverse, hard working community. People here are working to get ahead like anybody else. However, we do know that unemployment issues are impacting this community more than most, especially with our young people. The Government and we as a country need to do better.”

Saying we needed to “reimagine what Bermuda is”, Mr Commissiong echoed the Black Lives Matter campaign in the United States, calling for locals to ask if they value black men’s lives.

“I just hope it’s not going to take a real disaster or tragedy of epic proportions before that takes place.”