Police Department officials said on Thursday that they were seeking four people in connection with a shooting that left a 16-year-old boy dead and two other teenagers wounded in the Bronx.
Christopher Redding, 16, was shot in the back during the altercation on Wednesday evening and died at St. Barnabas Hospital later that night, according to the police and his family. A 13-year-old girl, Lakyra Webster, and a 15-year-old boy were also shot in the legs and were left bleeding on the sidewalk, a family member said. They remained in the hospital in stable condition on Thursday, according to the police.
It was not immediately clear who had fired the gun or what had prompted the violence, but it appeared to have broken out after an interaction between the 13-year-old, Lakyra, and a group of people from a nearby neighborhood, according to Lakyra’s family. The police have not confirmed the family’s account.
The police said they were seeking three men and one woman in connection with the shooting. They did not provide additional details about the four people.
The gunfire broke out around 5 p.m. on Wednesday on a busy thoroughfare on West 238th Street near an entrance to Van Cortlandt Park, in the Kingsbridge neighborhood, the police said.
That evening, Christopher, a sophomore in high school and an avid football player, had been getting a snack at a nearby McDonald’s, according to his father, Bryan Corley. Mr. Corley said his son had been preparing to head home when he received a call from Lakyra, who said she needed help.
Christopher rushed over to West 238th Street to meet her, Mr. Corley said, and the shooting broke out moments later.
Officers responding to a 911 call arrived on the block just after 5 p.m. to find Christopher with a gunshot wound to his back, and Lakyra and the 15-year-old, whose name was not released, shot in their legs, the police said.
Darryl Webster, Lakyra’s 15-year-old brother, said he had gone to the area as soon as he heard about the shooting. There, he saw Christopher crumpled on the ground as police officers performed CPR. His sister lay on the street nearby.
Emergency medical workers took all three teenagers to the hospital, where Christopher later died.
On Thursday, friends and family remembered Christopher as a loyal friend and promising football player with his life and career still ahead of him. Mr. Corley, his father, said he had been getting early signs of interest from colleges who wanted to recruit him.
“It feels like a dream, like I’m dreaming and waiting for him to come home,” Mr. Corley said at his Bronx apartment on Thursday, speaking through tears.
While shootings in New York City declined to record lows last year, the number of cases where the shooter or victim was under the age of 18 rose sizably.
The episode on Wednesday also comes days after Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced plans to restructure the department in the Bronx by adding 200 additional officers and splitting the borough into two patrol commands.
The move will allow police officers to handle the volume of work in the borough and better respond to crime in its neighborhoods, she said. The Bronx has long experienced higher rates of crime than the rest of the city. Last year, more than a third of the shootings in the city took place in the borough, the commissioner said.
In Kingsbridge on Thursday, classmates and neighbors filtered in and out of a public housing development near the scene of the shooting, quietly consoling one another and swapping stories about their friend.
Tyler Lane, 17, said Christopher had been a leader in their neighborhood, setting an example even when he had to navigate challenging times at home. “He’d always hold it down,” he said. “That’s the kind of kid that he was.”
Malachi Smith, 18, who attended high school in the area, said that he had noticed a recent surge in violence among teenagers.
“That’s one of the scariest things about this,” he said. “You don’t get a ‘wait.’ You don’t get a ‘pause.’ Your life is within your own hands one moment, and then it’s out of your hands the next.”
Maia Coleman is a reporter for The Times covering the New York Police Department and criminal justice in the New York area.
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