A 4-year-old child and two men were shot Tuesday night in north Minneapolis as they sat in a vehicle.

None suffered life-threatening injuries.

Police responded to a call of shots being fired about 9:30 p.m. and found three people who were injured after being shot while they were sitting in an SUV in the 3600 block of Penn Avenue N., said Cyndi Barrington, a police spokeswoman. Barrington said it appears the shooter had approached the vehicle and an argument broke out. "The suspect opened fired, and the suspect fled on foot," she said. No one is in custody.

A woman who lives nearby said she had just pulled up outside her home and was sitting in her car with her 2-year-old daughter when the shooting began.

The woman, who asked that her name not be published because the shooter was at-large, said she heard two gunshots, then a pause before several more shots came in rapid succession.

She drove around the block to call 911 because "I didn't want to be sitting here and talking on the phone with my little girl in the car when there was shooting," she said.

When she returned to the scene of the shooting, she saw a man lying outside the vehicle and a woman crying for help and "my baby got shot."

The mother applied pressure to the child's leg, the neighborhood resident said. "You could see the bullet bulging near the ankle," she said.

The witness, a former security guard, said she went to the man on the ground because he needed help. He was the father of the child and had been shot in a thigh near an artery and in the lower back. Another man was nearby with a gunshot wound to his kneecap, she said.

Joy Powell,

Mary Lynn Smith