MEDFORD, Mass. (AP) – A 5-year-old boy riding in the back of his mother’s car on Interstate 93 Wednesday night was shot in the ribs by someone in another car that had been tailing the vehicle for several miles, police and family said.

Sheldon Mathias was in fair condition on Thursday and is expected to fully recover, according to Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley.

The shooting occurred shortly after 9 p.m. on I-93 north near the Leonard Zakim-Bunker Hill Bridge, state police said.

Several shots fired from another car struck the vehicle, and the boy was hit at least once while strapped into a child’s seat in the back of his mother’s car, said Tony Suggs, 20, a front-seat passenger who identified himself as the mother’s boyfriend.

Police are looking for a gray or silver Pontiac that had four men inside it.

There had been no arrests as of Thursday afternoon.

After the shooting, the boy’s mother exited the highway and drove to the state police barracks in Medford.

“I was panicking, and I turned around and saw his face getting darker,” Suggs said. “I lifted up his shirt and saw he was shot. I told him, ‘Keep talking to me! Keep talking to me!’ He looked at me and said, ‘I love you.”‘

Suggs said he, his girlfriend and the boy had dropped off a friend at the Harbor Point apartments in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood earlier in the evening when they saw the Pontiac behind them.

The car followed them around the Columbia Road rotary onto Interstate 93 and through the Tip O’Neill Tunnel. As the two cars approached Exit 28, the shooter’s car was behind them on the passenger side.

“I heard one shot and saw sparks,” Suggs said. “Then the second shot blew out both windows. The next shot I saw (Sheldon) go like this,” he said, doubling over. The shooters’ car then took Exit 28.

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