A 16-year-old boy was heading to a Starbucks in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn in November, unaware he was walking near a marked man.
The teenager, who had just left a football game, wassteps away from the coffee shop on Nov. 30, when two people fired into the street. They missed their target, a member of a rival Brooklyn gang, officials said on Monday. But they struck the boy, severing his spinal cord and leaving him paralyzed from the waist down, officials said.
The boy, who was not identified, was one of seven people shot — one fatally — between April 2025 and March 2026, as two groups from Coney Island, Koney Sides and FOG, formed an alliance and fired indiscriminately at rival gangs around Brooklyn in attacks that sometimes erupted in broad daylight.
Four of the people shot, including the 16-year-old boy, were innocent bystanders of retaliatory violence that swept through several Brooklyn neighborhoods, including Brownsville, Crown Heights and Canarsie, officials said. The other victims included another 16-year-old boy and two young men, 20 and 21, officials said.
Fifteen people, including eleven teenagers between 16 and 19 years old, were indicted on May 6 on charges that included conspiracy to commit murder and criminal possession of weapons, said Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, who announced the indictments on Monday. The boy who was paralyzed was shot by a 16-year-old, officials said.
The other four defendants are between 20 and 27 years old. They have all pleaded not guilty.
“These men were ready for war, and we allege that they were willing to use those guns at a moment’s notice, never hesitating to take action against their perceived rivals,” Mr. Gonzalez said.
The accusations against the teenage defendants and the age of the victims underscored how youth-related shootings have propelled violence in the city, even as the overall number of killings and shootings keep dropping.
The feud was driven by grudges and beefs that are based on geography, with rivals mocking each other and escalating tensions in videos posted on social media.
“It’s not monetary. It’s not over drug turf. It’s not over girls,” said Joseph Kenny, the Police Department’s chief of detectives. “It’s just strictly over them disrespecting each other.”
Mr. Gonzalez, standing alongside Commissioner Jessica Tisch during a news conference, played several videos that showed some of the shootings, sometimes on busy streets where people were walking and riding scooters on sidewalks.
The violence began escalating after the April 27, 2025, killing of Javon Johnnie, one of the members of the Koney Sides/FOG group, Mr. Gonzalez said.
Two days later, at his vigil, members of the gang began talking about who might have killed him and mistakenly blamed a rival group, he said. Mr. Johnnie had been shot by someone he was trying to rob, officials said, but at the time his friends believed he had been killed by gang rivals based in Flatbush.
That night, four members of his group, including Tyquan Holmes and Tamari Carmona, 17, went to the Flatbush Gardens housing complex wearing masks and bearing firearms, Mr. Gonzalez said.
“They went out there looking for payback,” he said.
Surveillance video shows four people walking in a courtyard and coming upon two young men who see them, back away and flee. The group begins to fire when suddenly Mr. Carmona falls to the ground, fatally wounded. He had been shot by Mr. Holmes, who accidentally struck him in the head, Mr. Gonzalez said, describing it as an incident of “friendly fire.”
Five days later, Mr. Holmes texted his mother who had reached out to him to remind him to call his probation officer, Mr. Gonzalez said, showing the text exchange on a screen.
“Tell her I’m out of town,” he replied to her, according to the texts. “Got bigger things to worry about. Somebody life got took.”
Mr. Holmes then told her he was involved in the shooting, according to the texts.
Matthew Keith Mobilia, a lawyer for Mr. Holmes, now 18, did not immediately respond to a message for comment.
Commissioner Tisch said the defendants were awakened and arrested early in the morning on May 6 following a 13-month investigation into the two groups.
All but two of the defendants are “accused of pulling the trigger in these cases,” she said. Police officers recovered a total of more than 180 shell casings following the attacks, Commissioner Tisch said.
“Behind every one of these numbers is a real victim and a real community forced to live with the consequences of this violence,” she said.
In one instance in May 2025, four men wearing masks and hooded shirts shot at the house of a rival in Canarsie. One of the shooters was caught two minutes later by police officers who had been patrolling in the area.
In another, on Feb. 20 at about 11 p.m., a 16-year-old was shot in the abdomen when he was standing around Newkirk Avenue in East Flatbush with two other people. Three gang members shot at them, firing about 30 times, in retaliation for a shooting that had happened earlier that day, officials said, but the 16-year-old, who survived, had nothing to do with the feud.
“That is the level of recklessness that we’re talking about,” Commissioner Tisch said.
In 2025, the police carried out 70 gang takedowns and arrested about 390 people identified as gang members, she said.
That’s a significant number, Commissioner Tisch said, because about 60 percent of city wide shootings have “some nexus” to gang rivalries.
Maria Cramer is a Times reporter covering the New York Police Department and crime in the city and surrounding areas.
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