The fight that ended the life of Evette Jeffrey began like so many others.
“It was a fistfight,” said Joseph Kenny, the Police Department’s chief of detectives. “An old-school, schoolyard fistfight.”
He was describing the back story to the stray gunshot that killed Evette, 16, near a Bronx school building on Monday — a shooting that recalled the fights between rival gangs in the 1980s and ’90s that left teenagers in jail or dead.
After school let out on Monday, a 14-year-old boy got into a fight outside the building in the Morrisania neighborhood, Chief Kenny said at a news conference on Tuesday. The fight followed another one earlier in the day. The boy walked away the apparent victor, the chief said.
But then another boy ran up and punched him. Someone handed the 14-year-old a gun, and he fired three shots into a crowd, with the boy who had just punched him the likely target, Chief Kenny said. The shooter fled.
The 14-year-old boy was arrested on Tuesday as he tried to enter a taxi near where the shooting happened, the police said. He was charged with murder, the police said, as well as manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon. The police have not released his name.
Evette was not involved in the dispute. She had gone out to eat with her boyfriend, celebrating their anniversary. Later, they headed toward the schoolyard with her scooter to see her friends when the fighting broke out.
When the shots were fired, she fell to the ground, shot in the head. It was 5:04 p.m.; she was rushed to Lincoln Hospital, where she would be pronounced dead within the hour.
“She was an innocent bystander,” Chief Kenny said.
The shooting occurred near a building that houses three schools: the Dr. Richard Izquierdo Health and Science Charter School, Bronx Latin and the Bronx Career and College Preparatory High School.
The fights there appear to be gang-related, the police said. One of the gangs uses the initials K.O.D.
“That’s a new gang to the area,” Chief Kenny said.
The other is the Forest Over Everything gang, which has a criminal history. Three years ago, two of its ranking members were arrested and charged with selling dozens of semiautomatic pistols, revolvers and assault weapons, some out of the Forest Houses in Morrisania, a public housing complex from which the gang took its name.
Evette’s mother, Kristen Abad, 30, spoke of her only child the day after her death.
“She was my baby girl,” she said. “She just turned 16.”
Ms. Abad, who lives in an apartment building a few blocks from the schools, said she was napping when a neighbor ran upstairs and told members of her family — her mother, at least one sister and a brother-in-law — of the shooting. They woke up Ms. Abad, and the family ran outside, shoeless, but by the time they got to the scene, Evette had already been taken away in an ambulance. They hurried to the hospital, and 15 minutes later, Ms. Abad was told that her daughter was dead.
Ms. Abad said she had pulled her daughter out of Bronx Latin because of violence there and transferred her to a nearby high school, where she had been doing much better.
“She had been jumped and attacked multiple times,” Ms. Abad said.
During school hours, the hilly block of Home Street outside the school building is quiet. On Tuesday, signs of the shooting remained even as a sort of normalcy returned inside. Children’s voices came from the windows, mixing with the sounds of a nearby construction project. But police vehicles and school safety agents guarded the entrances and exits.
Williams Miralda, 12, a seventh grader at the charter school, said he was on his way to football practice on Monday when gunshots rang out. He ran in the other direction with a crowd, but returned and saw Evette lying on the ground.
“I couldn’t sleep at all, I kept waking up,” he said Tuesday. “I felt like throwing up. I saw a dead body.”
Williams said fights were common at the school, often bubbling up in the bathrooms during school hours or at nearby parks after the day ended. Last year, the fights were more frequent, he said, but this year they seemed more severe.
“I kind of worry about it,” he said.
The Police Department has been involved in at least 22 incidents at the schools since last year, according to the department’s quarterly school safety reports. It was unclear what behavior prompted the responses. But in most of the offenses, students were released to their schools for discipline and were not processed for an arrest or summons.
Matthew Delgado, 20, who lives near the school building, said it had a reputation as a hotbed for fights. His younger brother had attended a school there years ago, but transferred out because he did not feel safe, he said.
Since then, he said, things have improved. “The area got way better,” Mr. Delgado said. “It was getting safer, more quiet — but then right when you say that, things turn out really bad.”
Chris Jones, 33, a maintenance worker at a shelter down the street, said he had seen two fights nearby involving schoolchildren in the last year, but nothing as violent or shocking as Monday’s shooting.
“It’s tragic,” he said. “The vibe is usually just kids being kids, running around laughing and joking.”
Troy Closson and Maria Cramer contributed reporting.
Michael Wilson, who covers New York City, has been a Times reporter for more than two decades.
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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