2 slain, 6 wounded in 36 hours of gun and knife attacks CITY’S TEEN BLOODSHED
It was a bloody week for New York City teens — with at least two killed and six others wounded in a rash of shootings and stabbings across the five boroughs.
The frightening spree of violence targeting the city’s youth unfolded over the course of two days, leaving a 16-year-old basketball lover shot dead on a Soho street and a 17-year-old girl fatally knifed in the neck outside a Queens subway station.
“We need to do everything in our power to address violence in this city, especially among our young people,” said Pastor Edward Hinds, who worked with Mahki Brown, the teenage boy gunned down at an outdoor plaza on Spring Street near Varick Street on Tuesday afternoon.
Brown, who attended nearby Broome Street Academy Charter HS blocks away — miles from his East Flatbush, Brooklyn home — played on a basketball team run by the 67th Precinct Clergy Council, a nonviolence group also known as “The GodSquad.”
“Mahki was a very energetic, very vibrant young man,” Hinds told The Post on Friday. “It’s a tragedy that now we have to be preparing for his funeral service.”
Brown was playing “peacemaker” in a squabble between two of his fellow students at Broome Street when the shots rang out, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said.
One of the girls involved in the fight called her brother to the scene, and then two unidentified men showed up on a Citi Bike, Kenny explained.
“One of the kids on the bike pulls out a pistol, fires three times, striking our victim twice — once in the head, once in the leg. They flee the scene,” he said. “He steps in between, and they shoot.”
Investigators believe the participants in the shooting were also members of a gang, Kenny noted.
Underage crime wave
Brown was one of two teens shot on Tuesday. The other, a 17year-old boy who was blasted in the back around 11:20 p.m. at an Upper West Side public-housing development, survived.
Also on Tuesday, three 15-yearold boys were slashed in two separate incidents in The Bronx and Brooklyn. They all survived.
The following day, two 15-yearold boys injured when they were knifed outside a Bronx McDonald’s — and Sara Rivera, 17, was tragically stabbed to death outside the 46 St.-Bliss St. subway
station on the No. 7 line in Sunnyside at around 9:35 p.m.
“There is always talk about too many guns on the street — and there are — but it seems like every teen has a knife,” said one Brooklyn detective. “You think you are getting punched and all of a sudden you are bleeding because someone stabbed you.”
Police officials also blamed the state’s lax laws for the violence, noting a recent increase in gun arrests among the city’s youth.
“This is a direct result from the ‘Raise the Age’ laws,” one Manhattan supervisor said, referring to a statute signed by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo that upped the age for a teen to face adult charges from 16 to 18 years old.
The law, which went into effect in 2019, makes it likely that 16and 17-year-olds suspects get tried in Family Court, where they face less serious consequences.
“There are no repercussions for the crimes. The increase in crime is the opposite effect of what the law was intended to do,” the supervisor said, adding that it was creating “super criminals.”
NYPD Chief of Crime Control Strategies Mike Lipetri, agreed, telling The Post on Friday, “we have to have consequences.”
Last year, 11% of those arrested on gun charges were minors, “up 120% from 2018,” Lipetri said.
NYPD data shows that about one-quarter of youths arrested with guns in 2021 went on to be a perpetrator or victim of a shooting within two years.
“Eleven percent of all shooting victims last year in New York City were under the age of 18. Up 77% from 2018,” Lipetri said. And 96 minors were arrested in shootings, “up 92% from 2018.”
Senseless violence
The frightening statistics played out in real time in the 36 hours after Brown was killed. As of Friday, no suspects had been publicly identified in his murder.
No suspect was named either in the shooting of the 17-year-old boy at NYCHA’s Amsterdam Houses, which erupted during a dispute over a dice game, cops said.
Cops have not announced arrests in the Tuesday slashings, including the 15-year-old boy who officials say was stabbed in the head in a scuffle with other teens on a Bronx MTA bus. The two other teen victims were injured at a South Williamsburg intersection later that day, police said.
The NYPD is also searching for the attacker who knifed a 15-yearold boy in the chest and slashed the other in the hand outside the McDonald’s in Charlotte Gardens just before 4 p.m. Wednesday. The two boys are students at Bronx Vision Academy.
A 15-year-old girl was charged in the murder of Ramirez.
Ramirez and the suspect were both students at Queens Tech HS, Kenny said. They had only been friends for about three weeks.
“They begin to get into some kind of verbal interaction, where you suddenly just see the perpetrator just lunge at the victim, stabs her in the neck,” he said.
“While the victim was lying in the street dying, she was asking for someone to please call her mother.”
Ramirez was pronounced dead at the hospital.
“This is what happens when you change the laws and there are no consequences,” another Brooklyn detective chimed in.