Occasionally she makes a humming sound. Her eyes are open; her left eye is out of focus.
Her fingers move occasionally and so do her toes, but she cannot reach the stuffed lion cub her father bought for her Dec. 6 birthday.
"She's starting to come around, but she's not fully alert," said Yaya's mother, Nathenia Kirkland, 26, who visits her daughter each evening after getting off work as a certified nurse's aide at a nursing home. She prays by Yaya's hospital crib.
It wasn't always this way.
Yaya was a bubbly little girl who liked to dance and play with doll babies.
Then came the night that Yaya stopped talking.
"That night, I was just coming from work and had went to visit a friend," Kirkland said. "We went to the store to get some chicken. We ordered the food . . . My daughter was jumping up and down. She was ready to leave."
They drove onto Seventh Street through the dark Centerville section of town, which has one of the city's highest crime rates. Their silver Ford Escape made a turn in front of a sign at the United Methodist Church that exhorted passersby: "Running Low on Faith? Stop in for a Fill Up." They passed an ominous group of young men dressed in black - the uniform of drug sets in Camden. Yaya and her young friend tugged playfully on a blanket in the backseat of the car about 9:30 p.m.
"Give me my cover, Dora," Yaya yelled.
"We just heard the shot," Kirkland said. "We thought it was a firecracker. We saw the flashing of the light and we rolled up to a parking lot."
Yaya was no longer chattering in the backseat.
"Something told me to turn around," Kirkland recalled. "I turned and said 'Yahnajeah' [pronounced Ya-naysia]. I saw her mouth open and her head to the side and all this blood . . ."
The mother's reflexes kicked in. She leapt into the back and began to administer CPR.
