The Bronx murder is a crime committed by young people.
According to police, the shots that killed 11-year-old Kyhara Tay on Monday afternoon were fired by a 15-year-old boy.
Too young to be at the wheel of the scooter he is riding, he is being driven by an 18-year-old who has twice been the victim of gun violence.
The intended target, who had ducked into a nearby entrance to hide, was 13 people.
Early on Friday morning, the 15-year-old was arrested in his hotel room and charged with firing bullets at Kyhara, a lively sixth grader called Kyky, who walked on Fox Street in the Longwood part of the county.
The suspect “ends the life of a completely innocent, completely unharmed 11-year-old girl,” Commissioner Keechant Sewell said at a news conference, where she announced the boy would be charged. killing. “I wouldn’t say she went to the wrong place, because why can’t an 11-year-old stand out in broad daylight?”
The underage suspect is ride like a passenger on a motorized scooter Monday afternoon, according to law enforcement officials and a video released by detectives. He and the scooter’s 18-year-old driver, Omar Bojang, were chasing another boy, 13, who fled north on Fox Street and then ducked into the entrance of a building to evade attackers. chasing him, police officials said.
As the scooter sped past, the 13-year-old could be seen on surveillance footage rushing in the opposite direction. Police said the suspect then turned around on the scooter and began firing indiscriminately at his fugitive target. A stray bullet hit Kyhara, who was on her way home to visit her family. She was shot in the stomach and taken to Lincoln Hospital in a critical condition, where she died.
Investigators identified the suspect and Mr Bojang via video surveillance, and were able to track the 15-year-old to a hotel in the Parkchester section of the Bronx in the early hours of Friday morning. Law enforcement officials said he was found there with his mother and three other children. The family, who did not live at the hotel, checked in that night.
Mr. Bojang remained at large on Friday.
The murder is symbolic of what city officials and law enforcement say is a gun violence crisis affecting the city’s youth. Both Mr. Bojang and the boy charged in the previous shootings were victims of crimes – Mr. Bojang, 18, has been shot twice in the past two years.
“Eleven, 15, 18. Over and over, we’re seeing 11, 15, 18,” Mayor Eric Adams said at a news conference Friday. “Children kill children.”
Kyhara joins a grim list of kids who fall victim as New York City’s shooting rate rises, There are some signs of slowing down after a sharp increase in the early days of the pandemic. In January, an 11-month-old baby was hit while sitting in a parked car with his mother in the Bronx; She was taken to the hospital in critical condition but back home last week. In April, a 12-year-old boy, Kade Lewin, beaten to death by a stray bullet in Brooklyn while sitting in the car with his mother, eating a meal.
In total, 16 children aged 16 and under have been shot in the Bronx so far this year; Darcel Clark, the district attorney for the county, said five of them are under the age of 14. In a harrowing plea on Friday, she begged Bronx residents to help police hold those responsible for the violence.
“We’re talking about a gunman who’s too young to be called a shooter,” she said.
