Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on Saturday that he had spoken with President Trump about obtaining a visa for the mother of a 15-year-old boy who was shot and killed in the Bronx this week.
The boy, Javits Frimpong, a 10th grader at Dreamyard Preparatory School who moved to the Bronx from Ghana last year, was on his way to school on Thursday when he was shot in the abdomen near his home at around 9 a.m. He was pronounced dead at St. Barnabas Hospital later that day, the police said.
“The murder of a child is a pain no parent should have to endure, let alone from thousands of miles away,” Mr. Mamdani said in a message posted to social media. “Javits Frimpong’s mother deserves to say goodbye to her son in person. I just got off the phone with President Trump and he has agreed to grant her visa immediately.”
Mr. Mamdani’s outreach to the president came after he spoke to the family on Friday evening, a spokesman for the mayor said. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thomas Frimpong, Javits’s father, spoke to reporters in the Bronx on Friday and said that he had lived in the United States for two decades, but that his son had moved from Ghana a year ago to live with him.
Mr. Frimpong, a taxi driver, lives in an apartment on East 171st Street near Crotona Park, just a few blocks north of Little Accra, a strip of stores and restaurants named after Ghana’s capital. Mr. Frimpong, 60, said he made frequent trips back to Ghana to visit his wife, whom he had to call on Thursday to tell her that their only son was dead.
Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Ghana’s minister for foreign affairs, wrote in a statement on social media on Friday that he had spoken to Mr. Frimpong and had “conveyed the condolences of the Government and people of Ghana.”
“The Foreign Ministry will work tirelessly with US authorities to ensure justice is secured,” he said.
The loss of a young neighbor gripped the tightknit Ghanaian community in Little Accra on Friday, where a vigil was held for Javits at the site where he had collapsed after the shooting. Mr. Mamdani was also tapping his Office of Community Safety to send a crisis management unit to the neighborhood, a spokesman said.
“This is a devastation that doesn’t just affect this family. It devastates a community,” Mr. Mamdani said in an interview on Friday with a news influencer on social media. “This child was only here for a year. It devastates a diaspora; it devastates an entire neighborhood.”
The police said Saturday morning that they were investigating the shooting. No one had been arrested and a motive has not been established, the police said.
Mr. Frimpong said that Javits had excelled in science and wanted to be a doctor. But the boy struggled to make friends, his father said, and spent most of his time alone, using his phone. He also struggled with bullies at school, Mr. Frimpong said.
“My son is precious,” Mr. Frimpong said. “He is very, very clever.”
On Thursday, Mr. Frimpong said he had received a call from Dreamyard Preparatory informing him that his son had not showed up to school. Minutes later, the principal called and told him that Javits had been shot, Mr. Frimpong said.
Dreamyard’s principal did not respond to requests for comment. The city’s Department of Education directed requests for comment on the bullying allegations to the Police Department and said it was supporting the police in its investigation.
“Our hearts are with this young person’s family and school community during this unimaginably difficult time,” the Education Department said in an email.
On Thursday evening, Mr. Frimpong returned home after spending the day at the hospital where Javits died.
He was unable to enter the apartment building, he said, because Javits had taken the only key when he left that morning. Instead, Mr. Frimpong sat in the driver’s seat of his yellow taxi, crying with his head in his hands.
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