It Was A Bloody Weekend for NYC
We just got through a violent weekend here in New York City, in a year that is quickly becoming noted for outrageous violence. Yesterday was particularly bad: in just 11 hours, nine people were shot in seven separate incidents. Four of them died.
The bloody afternoon began around 1 p.m. when a Brownsville man was shot in the arm (he remains in stable condition). A 49-year-old bodega owner in Bed-Stuy was shot and killed during an attempted robbery. There was a murder at the Rochdale Village Houses in St. Albans, Queens, and other shooting incidents in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The shooting that received the most news attention was a murder/suicide at a Home Depot in Chelsea, where a 31-year-old Brooklyn resident and store employee snapped, shooting his supervisor before turning the gun on himself, according to the Post. All of this came one day after the horrible triple homicide in Queens, where a father shot his daughter, wife, and grandmother-in-law, before turning the gun on himself.
Also on Sunday, a 17-year-old Bushwick resident was arrested for threatening police with emojis on Facebook. The teen, Osiris Aristy, has posted several dozen images of himself posing with drugs and guns to his profile, some of them captioned with, amongst other things, the gun emoji pointed at the cop emoji. An informant noticed the postings and notified the NYPD. According to the criminal complaint, the posts “caused informant and other New York City police officers to fear for their safety, for public safety, and to suffer alarm and annoyance.” When cops showed up at Aristy’s house at 2:46 a.m. on Sunday, they found him with a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson and over 25 grams of marijuana. He was arrested and charged with making terrorist threats and weapons and drugs possession.