NEW YORK – New York City’s progress against gun violence faces a new problem as several shootings emerge, affecting primarily teens across the five boroughs.
And this is because more and more victims who are in this age are reported. The most recent were three 16-year-olds killed in shootings last week, representing the same number of teens killed in all of 2019, according to figures from the New York City Police Department.
Kyla Sobers, a 16-year-old teenager who was shot and wounded when she was in a Brooklyn park on Friday, is recovering at the hospital, and still has a piece of a bullet in her head. Police hope to locate people who may know information about this shooting.
Police investigators describe Sobers as a victim who was not the target of the shooting. The teenager was with friends in Boerum Hill Park after finishing her day of classes at Cobble Hill High School when three suspects came to the area on bikes and fired multiple rounds in her direction.
This shooting culminates a violent week for 16-year-olds across the city.
Two days earlier, two victims of the same age were shot and killed in Bed-Stuy and the Belmont section of the Bronx.
Jaden Turnage, 16, was found on Wednesday, around 6:15 p.m., with a fatal gunshot wound to the chest in Monroe Street, according to police reports. Almost six hours earlier, 16-year-old Nisayah Sánchez had been shot in the chest and the back of the head in East 187th Street. The young woman died two days later at Saint Barnabas Hospital.
Police have not announced arrests in any of the cases.
The first 16-year-old victim of the week died Tuesday in eastern New York.
Police said Cahlil Pennington was shot at Fiorentino Plaza Houses around 1:30 pm and emergency medical services took the teenager to Brookdale Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
In the first nine months of the year, the number of teenage victims shot to death in New York City has doubled from the number reported by police for all of last year. Authorities note that at least 16 teenagers have died in 2021.
It’s not just deadly shootings that have been triggered in the last week. Police responded to nearly a dozen incidents in the past seven days in which teenage victims were injured. The most recent occurred on Sunday morning.
Police said a 17-year-old man, who was walking through a park in the Bronx around 2:00 a.m. Sunday, heard gunshots moments before realizing that he had been shot in the back. The victim called 9-1-1 and was rushed to a nearby hospital.
The rise in violence against young people has caught the attention of both New York City mayoral candidates over the weekend.
“You need a street crime unit, undercover men and women who know where the guns are, where the gangs are, that has to be re-implanted,” said Guardian Angels founder and candidate, Republican Curtis Sliwa.
Eric Adams, the current Brooklyn Borough President and mayoral candidate for the Democratic Party, also commented on the rise in youth victims of gun violence.
“Our gun and gang crisis is stealing the future of our youth while putting our entire city in danger. We have a moral responsibility to get guns off our streets to protect our children, and we are failing,” he wrote in a statement.
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