A 12-year-old boy was shot and killed Thursday night in New York City as he sat in a parked car with an injured young woman and an unhurt little girl, police said. announced the police and the mayor of the city.
Police were called to reports of shots fired in the Brooklyn borough shortly before 8 p.m. (midnight GMT) and found upon arrival that a car was parked on a street with three occupants, said during a brief press briefing New York City Police (NYPD) Inspector Michael Kemper.
“In the passenger seat was a 12-year-old boy who had been shot multiple times. He died on the spot,” said the policeman, speaking of a “terrible incident”.
He added that a 20-year-old woman, sitting in the driver’s seat, had also been shot several times, was taken to hospital for surgery and “expected to survive”.
Finally, an eight-year-old girl in the back seat was unharmed.
According to the first elements of the investigation, the victims had parked their car to buy food when “shots were fired which went through the vehicle”, added Mr. Kemper, but without saying if the victims had been targeted or had been hit by stray bullets.
Present in front of the press, the mayor of New York Eric Adams, an African-American former police officer, wondered: “What happens to the people sitting in their cars and being shot? When are we going to stop fighting for the innocent in this town?”
The Democratic mayor took office in January on an agenda to tackle crime, recidivism and the illegal spread of guns in New York, a megacity of nearly nine million people whose crime statistics , in particular by firearms, have risen sharply since 2020.
“As long as we have guns in a system that encourages recidivism, we will continue to have crime scenes like this,” Adams said.