March 22, 2013: This photo provided by Sherry West, of Brunswick, Ga., shows her son Antonio Santiago celebrating his first Christmas in December of 2012.AP
Police are going door-to-door in a coastal Georgia town in a frantic search for two young suspects after a gunman shot an infant dead in the stroller his mother was pushing.
Officer Todd Rhodes of the Brunswick Police Department told FoxNews.com that numerous tips had been received in connection to the Thursday morning shooting, but no suspect or weapon had yet been located, police said Friday. Investigators were also checking school attendance records for leads.
Several nearby residents called 911 after hearing gunshots fired, but Rhodes said investigators believe the mother was the only witness to what happened.
"Understand this: There is no clear motive right now," he said.
The suspects in the killing of the 13-month-old boy and wounding of his mother are thought to be as young as 10 years old, Brunswick Police Chief Tobe Green said.
"He said 'I'm going to kill you if you don't give me money,' and I said, ‘I swear I don't have any,"' the mother, Sherry West, said in a interview with Jacksonville’s WAWS-TV.
West said she attempted to protect her baby, Antonio but shots rang out, striking her in the leg and her son in the head.
"I put my arms over my baby and he shoves me and then he shot my baby right in the head," West said.
West was later transported to the Southeast Georgia Health System for medical treatment. She is expected to recover.
"This is obviously a terrible day in Brunswick," Brunswick Mayor Bryan Thompson said. “If you know something and don’t call, you are complicit in this crime.”
Antonio's father, Louis Santiago, told WAWS-TV he wishes he could have been there to protect his family.
"He was special," Santiago said. "He had the bluest, bluest eyes."
Residents described Brunswick — a city of roughly 15,000 about 80 miles south of Savannah — as normally quiet despite some property crimes of late.
"This makes me very uneasy," Patricia Buie told The Brunswick News. "Now I am very concerned. It is making me want to move to the mountains."
Officers from a SWAT team checked vacant houses as investigators tried to find possible witnesses. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources provided a helicopter to aid the search.
A sketch artist from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was en route to Brunswick to assist police with the case. Police in Brunswick are heading the investigation, but the GBI assisted in the neighborhood search, according to GBI Special Agent Mike McDaniel.
A $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction if being offered by the Brunswick Police Department. Anyone with information is asked to call investigators at (912) 267-5516.
The mother lives in a rented house in the city's Old Town historic district. Beverly Anderson's husband owns the property and she said West has lived there for six or seven years.
"We're just very sorry about what happened and very aghast that something could happen in our little neighborhood," Anderson said. "It's a quiet, safe little neighborhood."
Anderson said people walk up and down the street, children walk to school and families are frequently outdoors. "It's scared everybody," she said. "They don't feel so safe outside."
She said West stayed home to care for her baby, who was often spotted in his mother's arms.
"The house has a front porch with a swing and we'd see him out on the swing with his mother," Anderson said. "He was a happy, cheerful baby."
It's not the mother's first loss of a child to violence. Sherry West said her 18-year-old son, Shaun Glassey, was killed in New Jersey in 2008. She still has a newspaper clipping from the time.
Glassey was killed with a steak knife in March 2008 during an attack involving several other teens on a dark street corner in Gloucester County, N.J., according to news reports from the time.
"He and some other boys were going to ambush a kid," Bernie Weisenfeld, a spokesman for the Gloucester County prosecutor's office, told the AP Friday.
Glassey was armed with a knife, but the 17-year-old target of the attack was able to get the knife away from him "and Glassey ended up on the wrong end of the knife," Weisenfeld recalled.
Prosecutors decided the 17-year-old would not be charged because they determined that he acted in self-defense.
FoxNews.com’s Joshua Rhett Miller and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
