An 11-year-old girl was fatally shot Monday afternoon when the passenger on a motorized scooter fired a gun at a man who ran down a sidewalk in the Bronx, police said in the latest episode of gun violence against children in New York. City.
The girl, who was once shot in the abdomen by a bullet, died late Monday after being taken to Lincoln Hospital in critical condition, police said. She was the second child to be shot in the neighborhood this year, and dozens of children and teenagers were shot throughout the city.
Police were dispatched to the scene of the shooting around 4:50 p.m., Assistant Chief Philip Rivera said at a press conference on Monday evening. A preliminary investigation suggests the girl was on Fox Street when the gun was fired from about half a block north on the same street at the man who was on the run, police said. The motive for the scooter chase and shooting was not clear.
Video footage released by the New York Police Department shows the man on foot pausing to hide in the entrance of a building. He runs in the opposite direction after the scooter zooms past on the sidewalk. The gunman then fires at the other man from the back of the scooter as he approaches an intersection.
Police said only one gun appeared to have been fired.
The girl’s name was not immediately released. She was on her way to visit friends and relatives, NYPD Lieutenant John Grijp said by phone Monday night, adding that no other details were immediately available.
“This is very, very hard for us to accept,” Deputy Chief Timothy McCormack, the chief of detectives in the Bronx, said of the shooting.
Deputy head McCormack said at the press conference that tracking the scooter and the person who fired the gun would be “extremely difficult and time-consuming.”
“But we will track it down and we will chase the scooter as far as possible,” he added.
Shootings in New York City rose sharply during the start of the pandemic and have not died down with the coronavirus, putting residents on edge and a campaign promise to improve public safety by Mayor Eric Adams, who took office on Jan. 1, on the was put to the test. rise in gun violence reflects a similar on a national scale.
Among the victims were young New Yorkers. By the end of April this year, at least 40 children and teenagers had been shot dead in the city so far. That figure was on track to match or exceed one from 2021, with 138 young people affected by gunfire.
Among the victims this year was an 11-month-old girl who was hit in the cheek by a stray bullet in January, two days before her first birthday, while sitting in a parked car with her mother in the Bronx. The bullet, which came out through the top of her head, was fired by a gunman who had been chasing another man.
The baby was in critical condition when she was taken to hospital, but she survived and was released from the hospital last week. The shooter has not been found.
