Stray bullet, strayed speeches: the death of Gabriela Prado on the discourses produced by journalism intends to analyze the idea of the stray bullet on the urban/social imaginary in the city of Rio de Janeiro. This paper begins reading the published press reports about the death - by stray bullet - of a female middle-class teenager in 2003. The aim of this work is to point out how the idea of chance or unexpected destiny makes the discourse about the facts so problematic. This work discuss the way how the Brazilian press tries to get around this gratuitous sort of death, rebuilding the victim´s biography in order to try to find a causal link that explains the murder. Threatened with the possibility of dying in the same way, journalists and audience seem to delimit the stray bullet in some types of narratives - although, it is a challenge to find any meaning for that.