Two teens wounded in three gang-related shootings near Manhattan schools: NYPD
Three harrowing shooting incidents near Manhattan schools sparked an NYPD crackdown Tuesday after two teen students were wounded in a five-hour span of gun violence, with police saying the attacks were gang-related.
“Right now, we are proceeding like it’s all connected,” said NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell in East Harlem, where two of the shootings occurred. “The proximity, geography around schools, age of the victims. And now we’re confirmed at least one incident, it’s gang-related.”
The bullets began flying when an escalating Upper West Side dispute left a student shot twice, with tips from alert local residents leading to the gunman’s quick arrest as he tried to flee in a taxi, police said.
The gunfire was quickly followed by a second school-related shooting, with a 16-year-old and an innocent bystander both shot in East Harlem just three hours later outside the Harlem Renaissance School — where the suspect in the earlier Upper West Side incident was a student, sources said.
And the last incident occurred at 105th St and Park Ave., with four shell casings found at the scene but no reports of injuries near a third school.
“We’ll be calling in multiple resources from other boroughs, and we’re deploying to areas the best we know how to slow this down,” said Chell. ”This surge will continue ... and we’ll go into the school arrival and dismissal [on Wednesday].”
Chell declined to go into details about the gang involvement in the three shootings.
The first teen victim was on the corner of Amsterdam Ave. at W. 68th St. on the Upper West Side when he was wounded around 9:50 a.m. after an unspecified beef between four or five youths that quickly turned violent, said Chell at his first appearance of the day.
Police sources said the victim and 19-year-old suspect Cheick Coulibalys were once classmates, with Chell recounting how the argument began outside a coffee shop before spilling onto the street. Three bullets were fired, with two striking the victim in his abdomen.
The bleeding 17-year-old, a student at the Martin Luther King Jr. High School campus, ran two blocks to the school for help as police took the suspect into custody about a block from the shooting after he hailed a yellow cab, police said.
“There was a woman screaming at the top of her lungs, terrified,” an employee at a nearby business told the Daily News. “She sounded terrified, and I think that caught the attention of everybody.
“And then three shots were fired — pop, pop, pop. After a few minutes, police cars came down like crazy.”
Another witness described two women helping the wounded youth up from the ground after the shooting.
A 9-mm. handgun was recovered from the suspect, according to a source. The NYPD was quick to put the cuffs on the defendant due to multiple 911 calls from local residents after the shooting, according to Chell.
“This was truly New York City working together to take a shooter off the streets,” said Chell, who credited the callers for providing an accurate description of the suspect.
The shooter was free on bail for a 2021 armed robbery and had a pair of arrests this year for drug sales, said Chell.
In the incident later Tuesday, the 16-year-old victim and a 27-year-old man were both shot in the legs on the corner outside the East Harlem school shortly before 1 p.m. The older of the pair was an unintended target of the shooter, police said. Both victims were taken to Harlem Hospital for treatment.
“I heard five shots,” said a worker at a neighborhood store. “The person that was shot on the corner, he can’t move. His friends come to help him. ... This happens in a year — three, four, five times. This is a bad street.”
The victim in the first shooting was rushed by EMS to New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell and was expected to survive.
“We did hear three shots,” said a worker at a nearby nail salon. “Then I saw walking and running on the sidewalk, and someone screamed. It was a lady with a baby in a stroller. She screamed, and then she was walking fast, pushing the stroller.”
Response to the shooting caused the Martin Luther King High School campus, as well as LaGuardia High School, which is also on Amsterdam Ave. about a block away to “shelter in,” meaning the students could walk freely in the school, but could not exit.
“It’s so close to our school,” said one worried 15-year-old girl, a 10th-grade student.
The security measure was lifted by 11 a.m. and students were allowed to move about freely.
The gunfire came a day after a 15-year-old boy was stabbed in a park across the street from his Queens high school, police said. He was taken to Jamaica Hospital in stable condition, and was uncooperative with police. No arrests were made in the case, which authorities did not link to the Manhattan shootings.
