1-year-old boy killed in New York as gun violence continues in cities

ByIVAN PEREIRA ABCNews logo
Tuesday, July 14, 2020

A 1-year-old boy was shot and killed and three adults were wounded at a cookout in Brooklyn Sunday night, capping a day of shootings in the city, according to the police.

Around 11:30 p.m., officers responded to a 911 call of shots fired outside the Raymond Bush Playground in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and found multiple victims, according to a police spokeswoman. Davell Gardner Jr., 1, was shot in the abdomen, transported to Interfaith Medical Center by private means and then rushed to Maimonides Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead, according to the NYPD.

A 36-year-old man who was shot in the leg was transported to the hospital and is in stable condition, police said. A 35-year-old man who suffered a gunshot wound to his groin was driven to the hospital privately and was in an unknown condition, according to the police spokeswoman.

Police said another victim, a 27-year-old male, walked into a Brooklyn hospital with a gunshot wound to one of his ankles, but his condition was unknown.

Police said two men dressed in all black opened fire at the group having the cookout and fled into the park in an SUV. There were no words exchanged or dispute before the shots were fired, police said.

The investigation is ongoing and there were no arrests as of Monday morning, according to the police.

The playground shooting was part of a violent Sunday in the city. There were 11 shooting incidents, with 16 people shot in total.

One of the shootings involved a 12-year-old boy who was wounded in the leg while sitting on his stoop in Brooklyn, according to the police. Davell was the only victim who was killed.

Shooting incidents in New York have risen from 84 to 223 over the last four weeks, a jump of 165.5%, according to the latest police data from the NYPD that was released last week. The number of shooting victims has increased from 100 to 304 during the same period, a jump of 204%, according to the NYPD data.

Shooting incidents in the Brooklyn precinct where Davell was killed went up from two to seven and the number of shooting victims went up from two to nine over the 28-day period, according to the NYPD data.

Shootings in other cities, such as Chicago and Philadelphia, have been on the rise over the last few weeks.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was visibly shaken during his daily news conference Monday morning when he spoke about Davell's death. The mayor condemned the violence and said all New Yorkers need to work together to curb shootings.

"It's never just about police. It has to be about police and community together," he said. "We have to always remember the good people fighting back."

New York City's Council approved its budget and removed a billion dollars from the NYPD's budget in response to calls for police reform nearly two weeks ago. De Blasio said the budget change was a good move and attributed the rise in violence to a "perfect storm" of rising unemployment, the tension between the community and police, a criminal justice system that has not been functioning due to the pandemic and other factors.

"We've seen us fight back from much much tougher circumstances, but it's going to take a lot for this one," he said.

ABC News's Aaron Katersky and Mark Crudele contributed to this report.

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