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| Mourners visit a memorial for Antiq Hennis, in the Brownsville neighborhood in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Monday, Sept. 2, 2013, where a day earlier, the 1-year-old boy was shot and killed in his stroller during a walk with his parents. New York Police Department investigators believe the boy's father may have been the intended target and are pursuing leads. |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- Police investigating the death of a 1-year-old boy who was shot in
his stroller during a walk on a city street believe his father was the
intended target, Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Monday.
Authorities
have some leads in the killing of Antiq Hennis in Brooklyn on Sunday
night and believe his death may be gang-related, Kelly said.
Antiq's
father, Anthony Hennis, had just gone to pick up the boy at the home of
the baby's mother, Cherise Miller, and take him to visit Hennis'
grandmother, Kelly said. Hennis, 21, put the boy in the stroller and was
pushing him across a street in the Brownsville neighborhood when shots
rang out at about 7:20 p.m., police said.
"All of a sudden, we hear shots," Hennis' grandmother, Lenore Steele, told reporters Monday at the site of the shooting.
After the gunfire sounded, Hennis ran up to her, she said.
"And he fell on the ground and said, `Grandma, my baby got shot! My baby got shot, Grandma!"
"He
was such a beautiful little baby, smiling and talking to everybody,"
Steele said, flanked by community group leaders and mayoral candidate
Bill Thompson.
Anti-violence activist Anthony
Herbert, who heads a group called Advocates Without Borders, said its
members were also gathering information about the shooting and urging
the gunman to turn himself in.
Grief and
outrage over the toddler's shooting loomed over the annual West Indian
Day Parade about a mile and a half away, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg
called the killing "a tragedy for his family, for this community, for
the entire city" and political candidates talked about gun violence.
Four
shots were fired, and one hit the boy in the left side of his head; he
was declared dead on arrival at the hospital. The gunfire left four
.45-caliber shell casings on the corner and bullet holes in the
stroller, Kelly told reporters before the parade.
"We
have some leads, and those leads are being aggressively followed," the
commissioner said. He said the baby's father isn't cooperating with
police and has a criminal record but didn't elaborate.
The
boy's father and mother couldn't immediately be reached for comment. A
phone number for the father wasn't listed, and activists who spoke at a
news conference said the mother wouldn't be making a statement Monday.
"The
family is suffering right now," said Bishop Willie Billips of the
Church of Faith, Hope and Charity, who drove the parents to the hospital
to identify the body of their only child.
"To have to take a young couple to identify their baby's body is horrible," he said.
Shirley
Jones-Baisden, a tenant association vice president in a local public
housing complex, wept as she recalled being with the baby's mother at
the hospital.
"They need some peace," Jones-Baisden said.
While
killings hit a record low in the city last year and are on track to
drop further this year, "we know that is cold comfort to any grieving
parent or friends," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said before the parade.
As
of Aug. 25, killings and shootings were down about 26 percent compared
to the same time last year, according to the mayor's office.
In
the police precinct that includes Brownsville, there had been seven
killings this year, half as many as during the same period in 2012.
Brownsville
is a struggling section of central Brooklyn, with a poverty rate about
twice the citywide rate, according to a 2012 analysis of government data
by New York University's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban
Policy.
It was at least the second case of a toddler being shot to death in a stroller this year.
In
March, a woman walking home from a post office in Brunswick, Ga., with
her 13-month-old son was accosted by a gunman who demanded her purse,
then shot her in the leg and fired a shot at the child in his stroller
after she told him she had no money, authorities said.
An
18-year-old man was convicted Friday of murder in the death of Antonio
Santiago despite his attorney's attempts to cast guilt upon several
others, including the child's parents.
In
another case of violence toward toddlers in New York City, 3-year-old
Tharell Edward was shot in the head and wounded Aug. 24 as he slept in
his family's Brooklyn apartment where an acquaintance was watching him.
Akeem Bernard, a friend of the baby sitter, was charged in the shooting. Through a lawyer, he has denied the allegations.
