PROVIDENCE — A 20-year-old man was shot in the back while sitting with a 15-year-old boy outside a building in the Pleasant Court apartment complex on Doyle Avenue yesterday afternoon.

Derrick Dacruz, who lives on nearby Pleasant Street, was taken to Hasbro Children’s Hospital with a single gunshot wound that Police Chief Dean M. Esserman described as not life-threatening. The boy was not hit.

The shooting occurred shortly after 3:30 p.m. in a courtyard between rows of apartment buildings. Neighbors reported hearing six or seven gunshots and then seeing two young men running east on Doyle Avenue toward Camp Street.

Capt. Hugh Clements said neighbors reported seeing the pair get into a silver-colored car and speed away.

The car, Clements said, matched the description of a car involved in an incident minutes later on southbound Route 95 near the Route 146/State House exit. There, according to the police, gunshots were fired from a silver Nissan; witnesses provided a license plate to the police, who said the car had been reported stolen in Cranston.

The police were trying to determine whether the shooting and the gunshots incident were linked.

According to court records, Dacruz pleaded no contest last August to charges of drug possession and was given 18 months’ probation.

— AMANDA MILKOVITS