A 1-year-old baby died and three men were injured Sunday night when two gunmen opened fire on people at a cookout in a Brooklyn park, the latest victim in a summer of spiraling gun violence in New York, police said. .
“This is very painful,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday at a press conference. “It is not something we can look the other way.”
The baby, Davell Gardner, was in his stroller when the shooting broke out around 11:30 pm near the Raymond Bush playground in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, police said.
Two armed men, dressed in black, approached the group, shot and fled, police said. Davell was hit in the abdomen and then died at a local hospital, the police said.
The bullets also hit a 25-year-old man in the ankle, a 36-year-old man in the leg and a 27-year-old man in the groin. They were all taken to hospitals and expected to survive, police said.
“These are the very real people affected by senseless gun violence,” Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said on Twitter on Monday.
Davell’s death culminated another weekend of gun violence in New York City, where shooting in June and July has increased sharply compared to the same period last year.
As of July 5, there had been 585 shootings, compared to 381 the year before. If current trends continue, the city is on track to cross 800 shootings during the year. It would be the first time in three years that the city reached that number.
Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, who oversaw the Brooklyn North patrol district before being promoted to head the New York Police Department’s office of Community Affairs, called for an end to the violence Monday morning, in a Twitter message. , saying, “This. Must. STOP!”
De Blasio said Monday, as he did previously, that he believed the increase in shootings this year was primarily driven by the “horrible dislocation” caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which devastated the city’s economy and overturned its courts and prisons. .
“The NYPD has become overloaded in many ways and continues to grow,” said Mr. de Blasio. “And most importantly, the criminal justice system is still not working.”
In separate shootings on Sunday night, two children, ages 12 and 15, were wounded in the city over the weekend.
The 15-year-old was hit on the wrist at 9:10 p.m. on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard near 143rd Street in Manhattan, police said, confirming a New York Post report.
The 12-year-old boy was shot in the leg at approximately 9:10 p.m. at Prospect Place near Ralph Avenue in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, police said.
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
