A police officer is "lucky to be alive" after she returned fire at a suspect who narrowly missed shooting her in the head on a Kensington street yesterday afternoon, police said.

"One [bullet] was really close, I mean inches away," said Chief Inspector Scott Small at the scene, on D Street near Indiana Avenue.

Small gave this account of how the mayhem unfolded: Officers responding to a call about a shooting just after 4 p.m. found a 37-year-old woman shot in the abdomen after an apparent attempted robbery on Hart Lane near Kensington Avenue. As that victim was taken to Temple University Hospital - where she remains in critical condition - police broadcast a description of the shooter.

An officer from the 24th District, headquartered on Whitaker Avenue near Erie, saw a man matching the suspect's description on D Street. When the officer, a nine-year veteran, stopped her cruiser and told the man to stop, he allegedly fired two shots from a semiautomatic handgun, hitting her car twice on the driver's side. She returned fire, Small said, grazing the suspect's head and hitting him once in the abdomen.

The suspect, a 27-year-old man, was taken to the same hospital in critical condition. Small said that police are confident, based on preliminary evidence, that he is the one who shot the woman on Hart Lane.

Small said that police found one .32-caliber casing at the scene on Hart Lane and two .32-caliber casings on D Street. Police recovered a semiautomatic handgun from the sidewalk on D Street, he said.

Small said that Internal Affairs would investigate the police shooting, but that it appeared the officer had acted appropriately.

"She did a really good job," he said. "Preliminarily, it looks like a really good police shooting. She was trying to protect herself."

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