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NEW YORK >> New York City’s police commissioner says investigators have some leads in the killing of a 1-year-old boy who was shot in his stroller while on a walk with his parents.
Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke today about the death of Antiq Hennis, who was shot Sunday evening on a Brooklyn street.
Kelly says investigators believe the boy’s father may have been the intended target. The boy’s family couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Bloomberg calls the child’s death a tragedy for the entire city.
Kelly says Antiq’s father had just gone to pick up the boy at his mother’s when the shooting happened.
Four shots were fired, and one of them hit the boy in the left side of his head.
Hennis and his parents were walking across a street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn at about 7:20 p.m. Sunday when shots were fired and the boy was hit, police said.
“I heard three to four shots. … I saw a man with a stroller screaming: ‘My baby got shot! My baby got shot,’ ” witness Gina Gamboa, 23, told the New York Post.
“He was going crazy.”
The boy was rushed to Brookdale University Hospital with a gunshot wound to the left side of his face, but he was declared dead when he arrived, authorities said.
Bishop Willie Billips of the Church of Faith, Hope and Charity, who knows the boy’s father, told newspapers that he drove the parents to the hospital to identify the body of their only child.
“I’m furious about what I’ve just seen. I’m outraged,” Billips told the Daily News. “A 1-year-old baby lying on the bed? It’s horrible.”
“The family is shocked and devastated,” City Councilman Charles Barron told the Daily News after talking with Antiq’s parents. “The child didn’t even get a chance to start his life, and now it’s over.”
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.
