The teenager who was shot to death Tuesday afternoon near a Soho high school loved basketball and commuted about two hours each day from his home in East Flatbush to attend school, close friends and family members said. Ta.
Maki Brown, 16, was shot in the head and thigh at an outdoor plaza on Spring Street near Varick Street around 2:30 p.m., police said. He attended Broome just a few blocks from his Street Academy Charter High School.
Lakesha Jenkins, a longtime friend of Brown's family, said: “He needed a change. He couldn't stay in this area. This area, where he had friends, led him astray. That's why,” he said. “But when his mother changed schools, a change happened. You saw growth and you saw a 'want to be better' feeling.”
Police say the shooting was the result of a fight between teenagers around the time they left school, and they are searching for two suspects who fled the scene. NYPD officials said one person was riding a Citi Bike at the time of the incident. It was not immediately clear whether the suspects were students at nearby schools.
On Wednesday morning, Jenkins and other devastated neighbors crowded into Brown's mother's apartment on East 93rd Street in East Flatbush to comfort her after losing her only child. Her mother declined to speak to reporters, but she nodded when others remembered Brown.
“I helped raise him,” neighbor Ramel Williams said through tears as he hugged Brown's mother.
“This is something that really hit us as a unit,” Jenkins said.
Neighbors said Brown loved basketball, played in tournaments every summer, and was close to his mother. Ms. Jenkins lamented the special gravity of her loss, less than a week before her Mother's Day.
“I'm not going to see Maki out there trying to collect change to buy a card,” she said, adding that Brown gave his mother a bag full of presents on Valentine's Day. “He wasn't a bad kid. He was a polite kid, and I looked at him and said, 'Come here,' and he stopped and listened.”
Friends set up a candlelit memorial in an alley near the family's building and scrawled the words “Forever” and “Long Live 16” on a brick wall. Late Wednesday, a young woman who identified herself as Brown's girlfriend walked around the memorial sobbing. She said she was with him when he died. “I keep looking at him on the floor,” she said.
Fatal shootings are rare in the First Police Precinct, which includes Soho, Tribeca and Wall Street. At this point in 2023, there had been no shootings in the precinct, according to NYPD data.
Jenkins and other neighbors said elected officials and community members must work together to protect young people from gun violence wherever they go.
“We need a mayor, we need a mayor [schools] Mr. Prime Minister, we need a governor and we need everyone to focus on making these streets safer for our children,” she said. “But as parents, as humans, we also have to go out and help. No one person can do it, it takes our troops to get it done.”