An 11-year-old girl was fatally shot on Monday afternoon when the passenger on a motorized scooter fired a gun at a man running down a sidewalk in the Bronx, the police said, in the latest episode of gun violence against children in New York City.
The girl, who was struck once in the abdomen by a bullet, died late Monday after being taken to Lincoln Hospital in critical condition, the police said. She was the second child to be shot in the borough this year, and one dozens of children and teenagers shot across the city.
The police were sent to the site of the shooting about 4:50 p.m., Assistant Chief Philip Rivera said at a news conference on Monday evening. A preliminary investigation suggests that the girl was on Fox Street when the gun was fired from about half a block north on the same street at the man who had been fleeing, the police said. The motive for the scooter chase and the shooting were not clear.
Video footage released by the New York Police Department shows the man on foot pausing to hide in the entranceway of a building. He runs in the opposite direction after the scooter zooms past on the sidewalk. The shooter then fires at the other man from the back of the scooter as he nears an intersection.
The police said that only one weapon appeared to have been fired. The girl’s name was not immediately released.
“This is very, very difficult for us to accept,” Deputy Chief Timothy McCormack, the commanding officer for detectives in the Bronx, said of the shooting.
Deputy Chief McCormack said at the news conference that tracking the scooter and the person who had fired the gun would be “extremely difficult and time-consuming.”
“But we will track it down, and we will chase the scooter as far as it goes,” he added.
