SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- David Carroll was buying a pack of Keystone beer and a bag of chips at a North Side corner store near his friend's house Wednesday night when he heard shouts.

He looked out the store's entrance: A woman and a teenage boy were running toward the corner store on East Division Street.

A blood stain was growing on the left side of the boy's white shirt. They needed someone to call 911. The boy had been shot.

The child -- whom Carroll didn't know -- collapsed in front of the store's entrance. So Carroll picked him up. The act was automatic, a reflex, "like you'd pick up a baby," he said in an interview with Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard.

A stranger pulled over her car and offered to rush the child to a hospital. Carroll carried the boy to the burgundy sedan and stepped in carefully. He set the boy on his lap in the front passenger seat and tried to keep the victim conscious.

"I said, 'Don't worry, man. You're going to make it,' " Carroll said. "All he said was, 'Please just help me.' "

Carroll said it was empathy and adrenaline that made him do his best to help the wounded boy, 12-year-old James Springer III, who police later would say was not the intended target of the shooter.

But something else motivated him. He said all he could think was, "Please. Not again."

Carroll's stepson, Loindale Johnson, was shot dead a little more than a week earlier in a neighborhood across the city. He was 15 years old.

Carroll had just buried Johnson on Tuesday.

On Wednesday night, Carroll was wearing a memorial T-shirt with his stepson's face on it. It's now stained with Springer's blood.

"That's some crazy sh*t, man. You bury him and then the next day, this happens," he said, his voice wavering. "That's the first thing that came to my mind. You lose one, that's what you try to do -- is save the next one."

Carroll, Springer and the driver needed only to make it a block or two to St. Joseph's Hospital. A male teenager looking to be about 18 had also jumped into the backseat of the stranger's car. Carroll said he doesn't know who the teen was or why he felt he should come to the hospital.

Loindale Johnson, 15, was shot and killed on the 300 block of Coolidge Street on Oct. 3. His father was wearing this shirt when he tried to save 12-year-old James Spring III.

"I told her the closest one is St. Joe's. It's right around the corner," he said. "And that's what she fled to."

They arrived at the hospital but encountered traffic, Carroll said. He picked the boy up again and carried him into the emergency room, shouting for a stretcher.

It felt like 30 seconds before a stretcher was wheeled over, he said. He was helped putting the boy down on it, and staff rushed him away.

Carroll stepped outside of the hospital and was questioned by police who had just arrived, he said.

He walked back to the scene of the shooting to see a small crowd gathered outside the police tape.

By that point, Springer had been taken to Upstate University Hospital. The boy died at 3 a.m.

At the scene about an hour after the shooting, Carroll, who works for a local moving company, was still wearing the bloodied T-shirt with his stepson's face and birth date. He spoke briefly to police, declined to comment to a reporter, and left.

Carroll, 38, speaking inside his South Side home Friday, said recent days have been hard. As he spoke, his voice trembled a few times. Sensing a wave of sadness as he spoke of his son or the efforts to save Springer, he'd stop talking, look away, breathe in and speak again.

"I just wish they could have saved his life," he said of Springer.

As they rushed the boy to the hospital, Springer did not say anything beyond his pleas for help, Carroll said.

James Springer III, 12

Syracuse police spokesman Sgt. Richard Helterline confirmed that officers had spoken with Carroll about his effort to save Springer.

"It sounds like he tried to his best to try to help James get the medical attention he needed," Helterline said.

The driver of the car, who declined to be interviewed in detail for this article, corroborated Carroll's account.

The city has seen three shootings of young, male teens or pre-teens in recent days. In addition to the homicides of Springer and Johnson, a 14-year-old boy was shot early this morning on a block adjacent to where Carroll's stepson was killed. The 14-year-old is in critical condition.

Police said there is no indication that any of the recent shooting are related. Carroll also said he didn't think Springer's and his son's shootings were related.

Carroll said he's not sure what the answer is. But, he said, it's got to stop.

"They could just be trying to fit in, prove that they hard," he said. "...You can't keep killing these kids out of stupidity."

But he said he's not hopeful that the violence is going to stop anytime soon. The two twists of fate involving Carroll -- one his stepson, the other a complete stranger -- have confirmed his bleak outlook, he said.

"They gonna do what they gonna do," he said. "What more can you ask for? You can ask for them to stop, but it's a hard plea."