Leonard Greene: Details of sidewalk shooting death overshadow tragedy of domestic violence
At the intersection of a national gun epidemic and the scourge of domestic violence were a dead young mother and a precious little girl who will never know her parents.
How bad is the gun violence that’s plaguing the streets of New York City?
When it turned out that a woman gunned down while pushing her baby in a stroller was a victim of a domestic dispute, residents of the Upper East Side, where the shooting took place, were actually relieved.
And who could blame them?
“If it were just random it would freak me out a little more,” said Amy Sry, 60, who lives on the block where Azsia Johnson, 20, was murdered while pushing her 3-month-old daughter in a stroller Wednesday night.
The neighbor wasn’t being callous. She wasn’t saying her heart didn’t ache for the young mother and her daughter.
What she was saying was that an isolated, targeted attack didn’t make her any more fearful than she already was.
That’s a natural reaction, especially in a city where it seems like a week can’t go by without someone being wounded or killed by a stray bullet.
Emphasis on “seems like,” because crime is all about perception.
The police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, can tell us that the number of shootings have declined for 10 straight weeks.
But it doesn’t make us feel any safer when one of those weeks included the death of college basketball star who was killed in the crossfire of a shootout at a Father’s Day cookout in a Harlem park just two weeks after he came home for the summer.
“This entire day we have been addressing the problem of an over proliferation of guns on our streets, how readily accessible they are and how there is just no fear in using these guns on innocent New Yorkers,” Adams said Wednesday, hours after the Upper East Side shooting. “This is the result of that.”
But it was the result of something more. Azsia Johnson died in such a horrible fashion. Part of the tragedy is that the sensational details of her death — shot in the head in a sidewalk execution — have overshadowed everything that led up to it.
Azsia’s heartbroken aunt, Sandra Johnson, doesn’t want anyone — not the mayor, not the police commissioner, not the residents of the Upper East Side — to forget that.
Johnson and cops said Azsia’s 22-year-old ex assaulted her on New Year’s Day, while she was still pregnant with their child, and stalked her and threatened her in phone calls and text messages after the baby was born.
“Domestic violence is real,” Johnson said. “It’s not a game. Hitting does not mean love. If a person says they don’t want to be with you anymore you don’t have to kill them and shoot them in the back of the head like a coward.”
Cops caught up with the coward on Friday, and Johnson said she will rest a little easier, but not much.
Bringing a suspected killer to justice will not bring her niece back, or fill the hole in a new baby’s life.
Neither will it make the streets safer from gun violence. That’s another problem entirely.
