REFUND THE POLICE!
Adams kicks in $2K to help catch ‘assassin’
Democratic mayoral front-runner Eric Adams said Saturday he’d donate $2,000 to help catch the gunman who blasted away at a rival last week in The Bronx despite being inches away from two little kids. The dough will go to the tipster whose information leads to the arrest and indictment of the brazen menace. On Saturday, the NYPD released a clear picture (below) of one of two suspects in the caught-on-video shooting.
Democratic mayoral front-runner Eric Adams said on Saturday he would personally donate $2,000 to help catch the brazen gunman who opened fire at a rival on a Bronx street, inches away from two terrified children.
“I am not going back to the days where our babies were waking up to gunshots and not alarm clocks,” Adams said at a press conference at the site of Thursday’s shooting on Sheridan Avenue near Mount Eden Parkway in Claremont.
“So I am offering a personal reward to anyone who has information that would lead to apprehension and conviction of the individual who discharged those bullets at those babies. Because if he would do it to them, he would do it to your family members.”
Adams, a former cop and the current Brooklyn borough president, said his donation comes on top of the NYPD’s reward of $3,500. He would directly pay a tipster whose information leads to the arrest and indictment of the shooter, his campaign said.
“This is New York. This is not a Third World country that’s under some type of war-like zone,” said Adams, who opposes defunding the NYPD and wants to flood the subways with more cops.
The two children — a 10-year-old girl and her 5-year-old brother — miraculously escaped unharmed from the mayhem that began at about 7 p.m. outside the Maria Pablito Deli & Grocery near their apartment building on Sheridan Avenue.
The siblings were out to buy candy with their parents when the gunman, wearing a black hoodie and black mask, began shooting at his target, who knocked down and trampled the kids as he ran for his life, shocking surveillance video shows.
Even with the children cowering, the gunman fired at the man — identified by police sources as Hassan Wright, 24 — striking him three times.
“When I heard the shots, I ducked. Everybody went down,” said bystander Victor Adames, 46, who is seen in the video rushing to comfort the children.
“The kids were shaking. They were crying. I held both kids,” he said. “I took them in the laundromat. The father was across the street. He ran and came and got them.”
Neighbors said the family is from the Dominican Republic and that the father is a cabdriver.
A woman who works at the bodega said the kids came in daily to buy items, such as plantains, for their mother.
Another witness said the gunman jumped off the back of a scooter and started shooting at the victim before jumping back on and taking off.
The victim, who neighbors said lives on the block, had gotten into a fight with a boy on Wednesday, according to someone who said they saw the confrontation.
“I don’t know if it’s retaliation, but he beat up the kid one day and got shot up the other day,” the neighbor said.
Wright, who was hit once in the back and in both legs, was taken to Bronx-Lebanon Hospital and was expected to survive, sources said.
Law-enforcement sources said Wright is a gang member who had been wounded in a 2014 shooting, and who had been arrested for shooting into a Bronx crowd in 2015.
Police late Saturday released a photo of a “person of interest” in the shooting. The image shows a clear look at a suspect dressed all in black, like the shooter, walking through a subway turnstile.
The shooting was front and center Saturday on the campaign trail in the final weekend before Tuesday’s primary.
“When I saw that video, all I could think about was the parents of those kids and the trauma that those kids were going to go through, being caught literally in the crossfire. This cannot be happening on the streets of New York,” Kathryn Garcia said at a joint appearance with Andrew Yang in the East Village.
Garcia, the former city sanitation commissioner, called for doubling the size of the NYPD’s gun-suppression unit and increasing gun buybacks.
Yang, who also wants to beef up the gun-suppression unit, said he wanted to staff up precincts in neighborhoods that have suffered from an increase in gun violence.
“As a parent, as a New Yorker, that video shocked and horrified me, and we have to put a stop to it. These things cannot happen on the streets of New York,” he said.
Maya Wiley, the former counsel to Mayor de Blasio who wants to slash $1 billion from the NYPD budget, said during a Queens campaign stop that “we have to be outraged by every single shooting . . . “What I am listening to is all the folks who do crisis intervention and prevent guns from being shot in the first place.”
The citywide surge in gun violence has hit The Bronx the hardest of the five boroughs, with 211 shooting incidents reported through June 13 compared with 97 during the same period last year — an increase of 118 percent.
And in Claremont, shootings soared to 32 through June 13, compared with 13 during the same time period in 2020 — a 146 percent rise.
A woman who was in the bodega with a 2-year-old when Thursday’s gunfire erupted said she had been crying for days. “He was in a little red cart,” she said of the boy. “I took him out of the cart and dragged him to the back of the store. He was crying.”
“I was crying until this morning.”