The 33-year-old woman had just stepped out of her South End apartment early Saturday morning to visit the next-door stoop where her neighbors were having a birthday party, when a car rolled up and someone inside started shooting, her family and a witness said.

At least six shots ripped through the gathering, a witness said. The woman fell, hit in the stomach. A man with her bent over her, pressing his hands to the wound, he recounted hours later with blood still under his fingernails. The building superintendent took off his shirt and stanched the bleeding on her back, where the bullet had passed through.

“It’s the devil’s circle,’’ the woman’s sister said, of the narrow rotary at the heart of the housing development on Harrison Archways, near the intersection of Harrison Avenue and East Brookline Street, where the shooters had driven by and where residents said shootings were frequent. “It’s one way in, one way out.’’

The woman is expected to survive, her mother and sister said Saturday morning. The Globe is not naming the woman, her family members, or the witnesses, to protect their safety. A man was also shot and wounded during the 12:50 a.m. shooting, police said, but was able to walk into Boston Medical Center.

Boston police spokesman Officer James Kenneally said the man was in his 20s and was expected to survive. Preliminary investigation, he said, suggested that the shooting was gang-related.

“Wrong place at the wrong time,’’ the woman’s sister said. “You can’t be safe in your own neighborhood. I have a 1-year-old — where am I supposed to raise him? In the house only?’’

The sister said she assumed the shooters were part of a gang. Her sister, she said, had only been outside for a short time when the firing began. The birthday party, the mother said, was for older folks, and her daughter was one of the youngest people there. She described her daughter as a funny and friendly woman with a big personality and said she had just stopped at the party for a cigarette.

The man who helped the woman after she was shot said the car from which the bullets came was white, and as it pulled away, the wounded woman’s boyfriend ran after it. The car had no plates, the witness said, and the boyfriend couldn’t catch it.

The wounded woman’s mother said this was at least the third shooting that she knew of in the housing development this summer. The man said it was the second in the development that he had witnessed this summer.

The mother said she doesn’t feel safe letting her grandchildren outside.

“You see somebody running and you grab the kids and run inside,’’ she said.

The mother and sister said they did not know who the wounded man was.

Evan Allen can be reached at evan.allen@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @evanmallen.