News: Funeral for Slain Mother
(Long Island, N.Y.) A twenty-four-year-old Bronx woman was killed early Sunday morning in Crotona Park East. She was the mother of a four-year-old daughter and her loved ones gathered to mourn at the Oritz Funeral Home on Southern Boulevard. Sources said she rested in a white coffin, surrounded by pink and white roses shaped in a heart and cross.
Some family members and friends wore black t-shirts with her name written in pink script. Her funeral is to be held tomorrow at Saint Raymond’s Church, and reports stated that a makeshift memorial was constructed at the site of her death. At roughly four in the morning last Sunday the young mother was hit by a stray bullet while walking home from a bodega.
Sources claimed that the deceased’s young daughter didn’t understand what happened and was told that her mother got sick and had gone to heaven. Instead, the twenty-four-year-old was shot in the neck after leaving the bodega on East 174th Street and Boston Road. Reports stated that she ran after being struck by the bullet and collapsed shortly after.
The woman had been purchasing sandwiches after leaving the store in the Tremont section. She was supposed to meet her boyfriend and daughter after working as a manager at an Applebee’s restaurant. Reports stated that she had graduated from Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School and was two blocks from her home at the time of the shooting.
The man responsible for her murder was a nineteen-year-old who had fired two rounds. A bullet also hit a twenty-three-year-old man in the leg, and sources claimed that the shooting began after an altercation had escalated between the two. It started because a friend of the nineteen-year-old’s cut the wounded man in line at the bodega.
The quarreling pair returned to the scene of the altercation with guns. The nineteen-year-old claimed that he was afraid of the guys at the bodega and had purchased the gun for four hundred dollars a month ago. Sources stated that the teen later threw the weapon into the Bronx River and bought a one-way ticket to fly to the Dominican Republic.
Police and authorities on the case accosted the teen while he had been aboard the JetBlue aircraft. The plane was scheduled to leave from John F. Kennedy International Airport. He was arrested Monday for second-degree murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, and criminal possession of a weapon; reports stated that he was arraigned a short time after his arrest.
The nineteen-year-old shooter has also claimed that he is sorry for what he did. Sources stated that his defense attorneys believe that the police are guilty of misconduct and may have obtained a forced confession.
