NYC has had more shootings so far this year than in all of 2019
Brooklyn boy Davell Gardner, shot dead in his stroller on July 13 at a Brooklyn barbecue.
Except for surpassing last year’s tally, the victim of the 777th shooting of 2020 would have drawn none of the attention of those tragedies.
Met by police at Lincoln Hospital, he explained that he was outside at 135th Street and Alexander Avenue, just outside the Mitchel Houses project in Mott Haven, and had heard the sound of gunfire, a law enforcement source told The Post.
He only realized he had been shot when he felt the pain of his injury.
“I’ve been living here 55 years, and I’ve never seen it this bad,” neighbor Mario Martinez said later Saturday night.
”There’s more guns. I’m telling you when I grew up here the worst weapon was a knife,” he said.
“Chains and bats. That’s when I grew up. Then came the next generation. Guns.”
He added, “I don’t think it’s going to get any better.”
New York had already surged toward the grim milestone overnight Friday into Saturday morning, with five shootings — three of them fatal — in Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx.
That rampage of violence began around 11 p.m. Friday in the Bronx, when police said a masked shooter gunned down 21-year-old Shaiquan Wilson at a gathering outside of 1741 Randall Avenue in the Bronx neighborhood of Clason Point.
The shooter — who wore a white face mask and all-black clothing, including a hooded sweatshirt pulled low over his eyes — can be seen in harrowing surveillance footage released by police walking up to Wilson, and pulling a silver handgun from his pocket.
The killer escaped, police say.
Ninety minutes later, at 1:35 a.m. on Saturday, 34-year-old Forest Byrd, 34, was fatally shot in the waist around the corner from his home in Laconia, also in The Bronx. His shooter also ran off into the wind, police say.
And about a half an hour after Saturday’s sunrise, a 35-year-old Dix Avenue man was gunned down in the the hallway of his Far Rockaway, Queens, apartment.
That suspect, too, is at large, police said.
““There are shootings here all the time,” said a 63-year-old neighbor who had been walking home from the laundromat when she heard the too-familiar sound of gunfire.
“There are gang bangers around here,” she said. “When I have to come out, I come out and I go back in.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio and police brass have put forth a litany of possible explanations for the bloodshed: The coronavirus pandemic, the corresponding closure of courts, anti-cop sentiment, restrictive new legislation, the disbanding of the NYPD’s anti-crime unit and the since-debunked notion that inmates released under state bail-reform law were to blame.
De Blasio has offered only a vague plan to combat the problem that largely amounts to gun-buyback programs and an increase in foot patrols in areas with high shootings.
Meanwhile, Hizzoner has refused to address the correlation between the surge in gun violence to the disbanding of the NYPD’s 600-officer unit responsible for taking guns off the streets.
Gun arrests were up 8 percent compared to last year when the anti-crime unit was dissolved on June 15, but plummeted 60 percent in the past four weeks, officials said Monday.
The troubling trend began in May, when the city saw a 64 percent jump in shootings during the month compared to 2019.
By the end of June, the city tallied 205 shootings — a 130 percent jump from last year.
Two Brooklyn precincts accounted for 109 shootings — roughly 14 percent of the gunplay citywide.
East New York’s 75th Precinct recorded 58 shootings so far this year, about 14 percent more than last year’s tally at this time.
The nearby 73rd Precinct in Brownsville, has recorded 51 shootings so far, a 50 percent surge from the 34 tallied last year.
And the Upper West Side’s 24th Precinct saw the largest percentage increase in the Big Apple — from just one shooting at this time last year, to seven, a 600 percent hike, the data show.
Additional reporting by Georgett Roberts, Dean Balsamini and Laura Italiano
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