14-Year-Old Gunman Shoots Man Aboard Brooklyn Bus

A 14-year-old gunman opened fire on a New York City bus in Brooklyn on Thursday, killing one person, reports the Washington Post. The incident happened at around 6:20 pm on Thursday aboard a B15 bus on Marcus Garvey Boulevard in Bedford-Stuyvesant. According to the NYPost, the gunman boarded the bus in pursuit of his target (another teenager) after two girls on the street shouted out to him saying “He’s on the bus!” referring to his target who had boarded it. Once inside the bus, the teen opened fire, following which a passenger was hit. The gunman’s intended target, however, was not hit.

After the shooting, the 14-year-old gunman got off the bus and tried to escape – but was caught by the police. The two girls that had pointed out the target to the gunman were seen callously laughing at the outcome, forcing eyewitnesses telling them to stop laughing. “I told them to stop laughing, it wasn’t funny, someone was really hurt,” one witness said. “I wasn’t the only one who told them to stop.”

The victim of the shooting has been identified as 39-year-old Angel Rojas, a resident of East Flatbush. According to an ambulance supervisor, emergency workers who had reached the spot shortly after the shooting tried everything to save Rojas’ life. He was declared dead shortly after admission to the Woodhull Medical Center.

The 14-year-old gunman has been since then taken in to custody by the police. The police did seize a revolver from the gunman. No charges have been filed against the teenager until Thursday night. Police are looking for surveillance videos from nearby establishments, and were in the process of reviewing footage they got from a Laundromat near the shooting site. At this point, the police believe that there was only one shooter at the scene.

Shocked at the sudden death of Rojas who had come to the United States from the Dominican Republic about four years ago with his family, relatives described him as a family man dedicated to his wife Maria Lopez and two kids Saury, 12, and April, 8. Rojas worked two jobs at different grocery shops to make his ends meet and was a regular commuter on the B15, which he hops on to between shifts to meet his family.

Rojas’ son Saury, shocked at the death of his father by a teenaged gunman, said. “That was very bad of him. He’s too small to be with a gun. If he didn’t have that gun, my dad would be alive now.”

The police later confirmed the identity of the gunman as Kahton Anderson who has been described by his grandfather as a “good kid.” He blamed the ghetto and the wrong crowd that Anderson hung around with as a cause for the teenagers’ “first real contact with the police”.

[Images Via Gothamist, Byron Smith]