Top News Online
Corey Dunton, 16, allegedly saw a status symbol jacket on another teen and wanted it for himself — shooting the wearer and an innocent ice skater in the process.
So this time shell casings, from bullets fired by another dirty little handgun in New York City, end up on the ice at the rink in the Winter Village at Bryant Park on a Saturday night.
It was apparently over a jacket this time, a status-symbol Marmot jacket, starting a beef in Midtown Manhattan the way expensive sneakers can start one sometimes at a playground: Corey Dunton, 16, down from the Bronx to Bryant Park with some friends, seeing the jacket on Javier Contreras, allegedly deciding he wanted it.
A few minutes after that, according to police, another teenager of the city with a gun opened fire, not caring that 14-year old Adonis Mera was in his way. The shooter and the gun never seem to care who might be in the way, on a street corner in Brooklyn, or the Bronx, or a rink in the heart of Manhattan where the skating is free, one crowded with happy people at the beginning of the holiday season.
RELATED: COPS CHARGE FACEBOOK-HAPPY TEEN FOR BRYANT PARK SHOOTING
“I want that jacket” is apparently the way it starts this time before a gun ends it. In that moment the skating rink at Bryant Park could just as easily be Rockefeller Plaza, where the tree is up and that place will soon feel like the capital of Christmas.
“We have seen this all before,” the outgoing police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, says. “There is an incident over something. A gun comes out, and a shooting is back on the front page of the newspapers.”
Adonis Mera, 14, was shot in the back while ice skating in New York’s Bryant Park, in the line of fire between the shooter and a coveted jacket. It is unclear if Mera will walk again.
Last week there was a story in the same papers about how there wasn’t any kind of shooting in New York over a 24-hour period. You know it’s something that hardly ever happens here, even at a time when the city is safer than anybody could reasonably expect it to be; when it fights harder and better against illegal handguns coming here from moronic gun-loving states down South than any other big city in the country.
RELATED: NOTORIOUS ‘BIGGIE JACKET’ SPARKS MUCH NYC VIOLENCE
Then comes Saturday night in Bryant Park, and the sound of gunfire returns, just off Fifth Ave., because Corey Dunton is allegedly told that he can’t have an expensive jacket that he wants. Or Dunton is told to get lost. Or maybe do worse than that.
The real start of summer, early June, another weekend in the city, a 15-year-old girl from the Bronx named Sarah Rivera was shot in the leg trying to shield a neighbor’s baby girl from gunfire. A day before that, an 11-year old girl named Tayloni Mazyck was shot on Gates Ave. in Brooklyn. She was with her mother and a 7-month-old niece and that time it was a 17-year-old, Kane Cooper, who allegedly decided to open fire on somebody from another gang and when he was done Tayloni Mazyck was paralyzed.
A 17-year-old accused of shooting her in Brooklyn in front of her own home. A 16-year-old said to be the shooter at Bryant Park, in the shadow of the New York Public Library. It was Fifth Ave. this time because it can be anywhere, no matter how much and how well this mayor and this police commissioner have done to take as many guns off the street over the past 12 years.
RELATED: TWO SHOT AT BRYANT PARK SKATING RINK; GUNMAN AT LARGE
Jesse Ward/Jesse Ward for New York Daily Ne
Says NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly: ‘We have seen this all before. There is an incident over something. A gun comes out, and a shooting is back on the front page of the newspapers.’
Back in June I sat with Robert Mazyck, Tayloni’s father, on another Sunday afternoon outside the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, part of New York-Presbyterian Columbia, at 165th and Broadway. He had come down from reading the Bible to his daughter.
“This time it happens to my daughter,” Mazyck said that day.
That was the first week of June, Tayloni Mazyck being put in a wheelchair because of a stray bullet. The first week of September a 1-year-old boy named Antiq Hennis was shot and killed as he was pushed across a Brooklyn street in a stroller by his father. The two indicted for that shooting were Daquan Breland and Daquan Wright. Breland was 23 at the time, Wright was 19.
“These are our streets,” Robert Mazyck said in June.
It wasn’t a street in Brooklyn on Saturday night, it was a skating rink in the shadow of a grand, regal library, skaters flying around the ice until one of them got carried out of the night, this time a 14-year-old boy being the one not feeling anything in his legs.
Another child hit in New York City. Another teenager with a gun. Because of a jacket this time. What is the real cost of the jacket now?
