A citywide manhunt is underway after a 7-month-old girl was fatally shot by a stray bullet on a busy New York street on Wednesday afternoon, police said.
New York police are asking for the public's help in identifying two people involved in the shooting at the intersection of Moore and Humboldt streets in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg area. The infant, Kaori Patterson-Moore, was hit after one of the people fired multiple times from a moped. Kaori was pronounced dead at the scene.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a news conference Wednesday night the shooting was gang-related.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at the news conference: "There are no words that can mend the heartbreak this family is feeling now, no declaration strong enough to lift the grief they are now forced to carry, no embrace wide enough to heal the hole that has been left their lives." He added that gun violence should not become normalized, and he urged the city not to "grow numb to this pain."
The girl’s mother, Lianna Charles-Moore, told the New York Post that Kaori was being pushed in her stroller when she was hit. Charles-Moore, 20, said that, at first, she thought the loud bang was fireworks before she realized Kaori had been hit.
"My daughter was innocent. She didn’t deserve that. We were just going outside to go get her a few things and my son a few things," Charles-Moore said.
The shots were fired by someone sitting on the back of the moped around 1:16 p.m. An unidentified man who Tisch said police believe "fits the description of our shooter" is in police custody as part of an unrelated investigation, and detectives are working to establish his involvement. The moped driver is still at large and the subject of what Tisch called a "massive NYPD manhunt" involving bloodhounds.
The man sitting on the back fired two shots into the street, she said, where there were several adults and two strollers. The pair fled the scene on the moped before it crashed into an oncoming car. The vehicle was abandoned five blocks away and has been seized by police.
"This is a terrible day in our city, a tragedy that truly shocks the conscience," Tisch said.
