Woman is fatally shot while pushing baby in stroller in New York

NEW YORK — A 20-year-old woman was fatally shot Wednesday night by a hooded gunman while she pushed her 3-month-old child in a stroller on the Upper East Side, officials said, another bleak episode in a wave of gun violence that has gripped New York City over the past two years.

The victim was on East 95th Street near Lexington Avenue around 8:30 p.m. when an assailant shot her once in the head at very close range, the police said. She was taken to Metropolitan Hospital Center and pronounced dead, officials said.

The attacker, who was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and black pants, ran off after firing, officials said, heading east down a tree-lined block with brownstone buildings on one side and a park and public school on the other. A law enforcement source said the assailant fled on foot, and that one unknown caliber shell was recovered at the scene.

The gunman’s identity has not been released. But the source said there was a history of violence between the victim and the father of the child, a girl, before she was born in March. Threats between the pair continued after her birth, the source said.

The child was unhurt, the police said. Police officials did not identify the victim and said they had made no arrests.

Mayor Eric Adams, speaking at a news conference at the site of the shooting, said the killing was another example of the scourge of gun violence in New York, and another reason he had made combating it a top priority.

The mayor noted that he and the police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, had spent the early part of the day with New York Attorney General Letitia James, announcing lawsuits that James and the city had filed to crack down on the untraceable kit weapons called ghost guns. He and Sewell had met later with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., to discuss gun trafficking more broadly.

“This entire day we have been addressing the problem of the over-proliferation of guns on our streets,” Adams said.

“More guns in our city means more lives lost,” he added. “It means more babies crying as those who love them lie dead.”

In an interview after the news conference, Julie Menin, a city councilwoman who represents part of the Upper East Side, described the killing as “absolutely unspeakable.”

She added: “This unrelenting gun violence has to stop.”

After surging earlier in the pandemic, shooting rates in New York have begun to abate, but they remain above their pre-pandemic levels. As of Sunday, there had been 624 shootings in the city this year, compared with 710 in the same period in 2021. That is a 12 percent drop, but still about 28 percent more than at the same point in 2019.

Even amid the recent declines, the persistence of gun violence — particularly in poor and working-class neighborhoods with large Black and Latino populations — has increased pressure on Adams. That young people have been victims in some of this year’s high-profile shootings has only added urgency to addressing the problem.

Just after midnight on June 19, for instance, a 21-year-old man and college basketball standout was fatally shot at a popular summer picnicking area in Harlem in an episode that left eight other people wounded.

In May, an 11-year-old girl was killed when she was caught in the crossfire of teenagers in the Bronx. In March, a 12-year-old boy was struck and killed by a bullet as he sat in a car in Brooklyn, eating a meal with his family. And, in April, a 61-year-old woman was shot and killed in crossfire in the Bronx.

On Wednesday night, Stephanie McGraw, the founder of We All Really Matter, a Harlem-based organization known as WARM that aids domestic violence victims, was just inside the police tape cordoning off the site of the shooting.

McGraw said she was there because she “got a call,” but declined to elaborate. Although the authorities said only that the circumstances surrounding the shooting were under investigation, she speculated that domestic abuse might be involved.

“You don’t just randomly shoot a woman with a small child point blank in the head,” McGraw said. “That’s rage.”