According to officials, a 12-year-old boy travelling in a parked vehicle in Brooklyn was fatally shot Thursday night when his family paused for a meal.
According to investigators, a hail of bullets struck the sedan, wounding the child in the passenger seat many times. Late Thursday, as rain started to fall, Assistant Chief Michael Kemper said that he had been confirmed dead on the scene.
Mayor Eric Adams decried the assault on “innocent people” and promised reporters that the perpetrator would be arrested.
“The mayor, a former police captain who has pledged to cut down on shootings, said the mayor, a former police captain who has pledged to cut down on shootings. “I always question myself, ‘What about the innocent people?'” “What about those shot and murdered while sitting in their cars?”
According to authorities, the cause of the shooting remained unclear, although two black automobiles were witnessed departing the scene.
The boy’s death was the latest dismal episode in a wave of gun violence that has followed the pandemic, raising some New Yorkers’ anxieties about public safety and putting Mr. Adams’ campaign pledge to do everything possible to assuage those concerns to the test.
While crime in New York is far lower than it was during past, more difficult eras of the city’s recent history, early year-end police numbers indicate that there were more than 1,500 shootings in 2020 and 2021. That was over double the total for the previous two years combined, and it was the biggest total in a decade.
This month, 29 individuals were shot in New York City, including two visitors at a Queens bar, a man on a Brooklyn subway platform, and a Jamaican immigrant killed in the Bronx during an incident.
Although the spike in gun violence in New York is part of a wider national trend, it is felt most strongly in many of the same neighbourhoods where it has long been a cause for concern: those mostly inhabited by poor and working-class black and Hispanic residents.
According to Chief Kemper, the child was tragically shot on Thursday at 7:45 p.m. in the East Flatbush neighbourhood between East 56th Street and Linden Boulevard.
According to authorities, the car’s driver, a 20-year-old woman, was shot many times and was undergoing surgery late Thursday; she was expected to survive. According to investigators, an eight-year-old kid seated in the back of the vehicle had no injuries.
Chief Kemper, who denounced “another unnecessary gunshot,” said that the boy’s family had “pulled over to have some supper.”
The police first withheld the identities of those shot, indicating only that they were family members.
