A 16-year-old girl was killed and two other youths injured by stray bullets in New York City on Friday after a man was fired while arguing with another on the street, police said.
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According to the account of New York Police Chief (NYPD) Keechant Sewell, during a brief press briefing on the spot, the young woman was returning from her high school in the Bronx, in the north of Manhattan, accompanied by another 16 year old and a 17 year old boy.
At a crossroads, a man on foot was arguing with another individual on the opposite sidewalk, when he pulled out a gun and fired repeatedly, according to Keechant Sewell, who blasted the behavior as '
brazen criminals
' .
The first teenager was hit in the chest and the other two in the leg and buttocks.
The three young people were transported to the hospital, but the most seriously injured, who should have had "
a bright future
", died, denounced the head of the NYPD.
The other two are hospitalized in stable condition.
There have been no arrests but police have CCTV footage and have promised that those responsible will be brought to justice.
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This is the second time in a week in New York that young people have been victims of stray bullets fired in the middle of the street by armed individuals: on March 31, a 12-year-old boy was killed in Brooklyn while he was eating in a stationary car with an injured 20-year-old woman and an unharmed eight-year-old girl.
New York's new Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, a former police officer, was elected in late 2021 on a platform to tackle crime, recidivism and the illegal spread of guns in a megacity of nine million people whose Crime and misdemeanor statistics have risen sharply since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
For the first quarter of 2022 -- from January 1 to early April -- the number of shootings and shootings in New York City increased from 260 to 296 compared to the same period of 2021, according to NYPD figures released on Wednesday.