The 11-year MTA veteran who was behind the wheel of the Bronx bus where three riders were injured by a stray bullet Saturday said the incident was the second time his bus was shot up.
Jose Pabon, 60, was passing through Westchester Avenue and Tinton Avenue at 3:21 p.m. when the slug smashed through the window, spraying glass through the inside of the BX4 bus.
“As soon as the light changed and I was leaving the bus stop, I heard a gunshot,” he told The Post.
“I thought it was a gunman on my bus, that’s how loud it was.”
The chaos was immediate, Pabon said, with riders screaming, “Someone got shot, someone got shot!”
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A 59-year-old woman suffered a graze wound to the chest, while two 67-year-olds were injured by the exploding glass, according to police.
They were taken to Lincoln Hospital in stable condition.
Pabon, a longtime Bronx resident, said it was only his second time driving the BX4’s southeastern route — but it wasn’t the first time bullets were fired at an MTA bus that he was driving.
“This is the second time it happened to me. It went through a window when I was driving,” the father of five said, adding that the first incident occurred about eight years ago while he was driving on Valentine Avenue near Poe Park in The Bronx.
“It skinned my ear. I felt it skin my ear.”
Police said the bullet flew through Pabon’s bus Saturday, when a man who was fighting with someone at 756 Union Ave. fired at another vehicle and missed, striking the bus instead.
Witnesses said the shooter was spraying bullets as he chased his target down Union Avenue before fleeing in a car.
Pabon said the incident wasn’t going to scare him away from his profession, but that he would be taking several days off to “relax.”
The shooting has, however, encouraged him to move out of the borough.
“I’m not happy about it. It’s a chance you are taking out here,” he told The Post.
“I always tell my kids you never know. I can walk out this door this morning and won’t come home this afternoon because it’s a dangerous job.
He urged officials to “crack down” on the city’s rampant gun violence.
“You don’t know who is carrying a gun these days. All these kids, they mean to shoot someone else and they don’t know to shoot guns. They just shoot all wild, and then the innocent people get hit. It happens all the time.”
“I’m really tired of living here in the Bronx because all of this keeps happening.”
Asked where he’d go instead, Pabon said, “Anywhere but here.”