Boy, 1, shot to death in stroller on NYC street
NEW YORK — A 1-year-old boy in a stroller was fatally shot in the face as his parents pushed him across a city street, and police continued looking for the gunman Monday.
Antiq 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. Investigators have yet to determine who was the intended target, and no arrests have been made, police said Monday.
“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 (bit.ly/1fsZnns).
“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 (http://nydn.us/14c05G3 ). “A 1-year-old baby lying on the bed? It’s horrible.”
The boy’s family could not immediately be reached.
“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.
