A 12-year-old boy who was sitting in a parked car in Brooklyn was fatally shot Thursday night after his family stopped to eat, police said.
A hail of bullets fell on the car, officials said, and the boy, who was in the passenger seat, was hit multiple times. He was pronounced dead at the scene, assistant chief Michael Kemper said at a news conference late Thursday when it started to rain.
Speaking at the press conference, Mayor Eric Adams deplored the attack on “innocent people” and vowed the gunman would be caught.
“The 12-year-old we lost, sitting here in that car eating dinner,” said the mayor, a former police captain who has pledged to stop the increase in shootings. “The question I keep asking is, ‘What about the innocent people? What about people sitting in their cars and getting shot?’”
The motive for the shooting was unclear, police said, adding that two black sedans were seen fleeing the scene.
The boy’s death was the latest grim episode in a wave of gun violence that accompanied the pandemic, fueling some New Yorkers’ public safety concerns and Mr Adams’ campaign promise to do what it takes to address those fears. was put to the test.
Crime in New York generally remains well below the level of previous, more troubled chapters of the city’s recent history, but there were more than 1,500 shootings in 2020 and 2021, according to preliminary police data at the end of the year. That was about twice as much as in each of the previous two years and the highest figure in ten years.
Over a weekend this month, 29 people were gunned down in New York City, including two customers at a Queens bar, a man on a Brooklyn subway platform and a Jamaican immigrant killed after an argument in the Bronx.
The spike in New York gun violence, part of a wider national trend, is still felt most strongly in many of the same neighborhoods where it has long marred everyday life: those largely home to poor and working-class blacks and Latinos. Residents.
The boy’s fatal shooting on Thursday occurred around 7:45 p.m. on East 56th Street and Linden Boulevard in the East Flatbush section, Chief Kemper said.
The driver of the car, a 20-year-old woman, was also shot multiple times and underwent surgery late Thursday, police said; she was expected to survive. An 8-year-old girl in the back was not injured, police said.
The boy’s family had been “pushed over to get something to eat,” chief Kemper said, denouncing what he called “another senseless shooting.”
Police did not immediately release the names of those who were shot, other than that they were members of the same family.
The town’s children are often caught in the crossfire of the wave of shootings.
Last Friday, a 3-year-old girl was struck in the shoulder with a stray bullet after she left a daycare center in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn with her father around 6 p.m., police said. The gunman’s intended target was a man who put his 2-year-old son in his car nearby, police said.
In January, an 11-month-old girl was hit in the cheek by a stray bullet while sitting with her mother in a car parked in the Bronx, police said.
That episode was one of a wave of gun violence, including the murder of a 19-year-old Burger King worker during a robbery in East Harlem and the fatal shooting of two police officers.
