Fam & friends mourn 1st vic of deadly nite

The devastated friends and family of Jose Cepeda — the first of nine people to die in a bloody wave of post-Fourth of July violence — took to social media to mourn, and condemn the gun violence that took his life.

Cepeda, 20, was shot to death on Atkins Ave. in East New York, Brooklyn (inset), just before 12:45 a.m., the first victim in a relentless tide of gun violence that swept through four of the city’s five boroughs Sunday.

“We just got off the phone with the father of Jose Cepeda, the first person murdered last night,” family friend Susan Deer Cloud wrote on Facebook Sunday night. “It was awful. The father is a friend and was sobbing his heart out. He and his wife don’t really know what happened. We are so shook up by this.”

Another relative, Jasmine Galarza, posted more than 40 photos of Cepeda, many of them from his childhood, showing off his beaming smile as he poses with relatives.

“This is us!!! Rest in peace son 2/28/00-7/5/20 until we meet again!!! Gun violence has to come to a stop!!!”

A neighbor said someone was giving Cepeda’s mother (above, with Jose Cepeda) a hard time before the shooting, and he came down to defend her.

“The young guy [Cepeda] was sleeping and someone went and got him,” neighbor Natasha Ramsay, 42, said. Her brother-in-law saw the violence, she said. “The young guy cuff [hit] him in his face, and he came back with the gun.”

Cepeda and his killer knew each other, Ramsay said. “They all used to be out there. They’re all friends. Practically every single day they hang out there.”

Billy Kisic, whose daughter was an old friend of Cepeda’s, described him as the father of a young boy, with another child on the way. “He was rocky and then he started growing up, and the streets don’t want you to grow up,” Kisic said.

“He was still finding himself,” Kisic said.

Police sources also identified several other victims of Sunday’s bloodshed.

Jahrell Gause, 21, was fatally shot in the chest in front of a building on Christopher Ave. near Glenmore Ave. in Brownsville just after 5:45 p.m.

In the Bronx, gunfire cut down Joel Baba, 22, and Eghosa Imafidon, 27, in a building on E. 171st St. by College Ave. in Claremont at about 8 p.m. A third victim, a 29-year-old man, was also wounded.

And on Staten Island, 45year-old Moleik Beverly was shot dead just after 8:45 p.m. in a building in the Stapleton Houses, on Gordon St. at Broad St.