Fatal shooting of a teenager shocks an urban oasis

As he often does, Clark Peña sat on a bench in Harlem’s Riverbank State Park on a Saturday night, catching up on work and watching families play and picnic on a humid Fourth of July weekend.

Then he heard about five shots ring out. It was sometime after 6pm and the sun was hazy but still bright.

“I thought, ‘It can’t be gunfire, it’s daylight. It must be fireworks,'” Mr. Peña said in a telephone interview Sunday morning.

Mr Peña, a US Army veteran, said he ran to the source of the noise, where he saw a boy lying face down on a road near a basketball court, a pool of blood beneath him.

“His eyes were rolled up and he was panting,” Mr. Peña said. “He was at the beginning of his life, this young man.” The boy was only 15.

State police officers arrived and rushed to help the boy, who had been shot in the chest and leg, Mr. Peña said.

The 15-year-old boy was rushed to an area hospital but could not be rescued, Major Brian P. Webster, a troop commander with the New York State Police, said in a statement.

It was unclear on Sunday whether the teen was the target or if he had been caught in a crossfire. No one has been arrested. Police were unable to identify the teen.

Riverbank Park, a long stretch of greenery along the Hudson River from approximately West 137th to West 145th Street, is an urban oasis. Just off busy roads that take people out of town, the park – with its playground, basketball court, swimming pool, barbecue areas and garden – is a place of tranquility for those staying local to enjoy the Upper Manhattan summer.

“I’ve never heard of anything like this happening here,” says 38-year-old Jonathan Munoz, who comes to the park several times a week to bike or run.

Channon Greenfield, 36, arrived about 20 minutes after the shooting to check his bed of cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce in the park’s gated community garden. A woman he knows from the garden, who was tending to plants when the shots were fired, ran and hid in sheds with other gardeners, while others lay down next to the raised garden beds, hoping they would provide cover, he was told .

“How crazy it is that you can just get shot and killed while gardening,” said Mr Greenfield the next day, as he returned to the park to tend to his vegetables.

Across from where the previous day’s shooting took place, a group of people played hoops in the late morning sun on Sunday. At the side of the basketball court, three men took a break from the heat on the court and dried their eyebrows in the shade of a tree.

There have been 464 shootings in the city this year through June 25, compared to 616 shootings during the same period last year, according to the most recently available police statistics. In those incidents, 543 people were shot this year compared to 739 people last year.

On Sunday, a group of young men gathered outside an apartment building on West 141st Street, off Broadway, staring at a dozen memorial candles lit in honor of the victim. They declined to comment.

Another neighbour, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity for security reasons, said a group of young people spending time in the area had recently caught the attention of police.