FAMILY IN HIGH PLACES
Tower-shoot suspect from pol dynasty
Farris Koroma, who was accused of sowing panic by randomly firing a handgun into a luxury Upper East Side highrise, hails from a powerful African political dynasty, The Post has learned.
Koroma’s aunt is the former first lady of Sierra Leone, his uncle the ex-president of the African nation, and his grandfather was once the country’s attorney general. His mother works for the United Nations and another aunt is a top diplomat for an international development agency, public records and press reports show.
But the diplomatic muscle may not be enough to get the 22-year-old business student off the hook in the recent shooting spree, a police source told The Post.
Koroma, who surrendered to police in Queens on Aug. 24, was charged with weapon possession, reckless endangerment and criminal mischief.
Police say he shot a .38-cali- ber pistol at the 49-story residential tower on East 72nd Street from the riverfront promenade on Roosevelt Island where he lives.
Last month, bullets pierced the windows of two river-facing apartments at One East River Place, according to the NYPD.
Koroma had been arrested 10 previous times on charges that include robbery, grand larceny and marijuana possession in the city and upstate, according to published reports and authorities. Although a police source told The Post Koroma does not have diplomatic immunity, his previous cases are all sealed, according to a spokeswoman for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
His lawyer has claimed he has no criminal record.
Two years ago, he was arrested for drug possession, according to the NYPD, and he was busted on a marijuanapossession charge in Binghamton on Dec. 3, a case that is pending, public records show.
And if he was hoping to return to his politically connected family in Africa, Koroma is out of luck because he was forced to give up his passport after his arrest.
Born in New York on March 19, 1996, Koroma grew up on Roosevelt Island, a peaceful enclave favored by UN diplomats and bureaucrats. His mother, Celine Koroma, is the administrative coordinator for the Lesotho Permanent Mission to the United Nations, according to information attached to the $100,000 bail bond that the family posted for him last month. The bond lists his father as an architect who worked for the MTA.
Abu’s dad was the late Abu Aiah Koroma, Sierra Leone’s attorney general in the late 1960s and head of a government-owned diamond mine.
And Abu’s sister Finda, a lawyer with degrees from Cambridge University and Harvard, is a vice president of the Economic Community of West African States, according to her bio on the agency’s Web site.
Another sister, Sia Niyama Koroma, is a biochemist and nurse who served as the first lady of Sierra Leone from 2007 until her husband, Ernest Bai Koroma, was defeated in elections in April.
Despite his impressive lineage, Farris Koroma has cultivated a bad-boy persona on social media. In Facebook posts, he bragged about being a member of a faction of the Crips gang known as Rich Blocc Crips and warned that he would shoot “somebody.”
“This summer is trash. Im bout to shoot somebody,” he wrote in a July 14 Facebook post that was taken down before his arraignment last month. Koroma is a student at upstate SUNY Sullivan Community College, neighbors told The Post.
“I joined a gang cause i felt that love, i felt unity, and i felt loyalty amongst my brothers,” Koroma wrote in another Facebook post.