Boy, 15, Is Fatally Shot in Brooklyn After Dispute Among Teens

By Maria Cramer and Wesley Parnell

On July 18, 2023

The police said the teenager, the son of immigrants from Uzbekistan, had not been the intended target in the shooting.

A 15-year-old boy was fatally shot in the back in Brooklyn on Monday afternoon, the police said, the latest in a disturbing rise in shootings involving young people in New York City, even as shootings in general have dropped.

The boy, Faridun Mavlonov, was shot on 20th Avenue, about a mile from his home in Bensonhurst.

The police responded to a 911 call at 1 p.m. Monday and found the teenager, who was taken to Maimonides Medical Center in critical condition.

He was pronounced dead on Tuesday, the police said. Investigators are looking for a 17-year-old boy who fired seven times at a group of teenagers a few blocks from Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School, where they were all attending summer school, said Chief James Essig, who is head of the department’s detective bureau. Faridun was not the shooter’s intended target, Chief Essig said.

Outside the family home, a six-story brick building on West 11th Street, the boy’s father, Firdavs Mavlonov, paced up and down the block as relatives and neighbors took turns hugging him.

He recalled getting a call from his nephew on Monday telling him Faridun had been shot.

Mr. Mavlonov, a barber, said he ran to the scene, then followed the ambulance carrying his son to the hospital. Doctors operated twice, “but the bleeding wouldn’t stop,” said Mr. Mavlonov.

He said his son would pop in frequently to his barbershop, where he would bring extra towels for his father and greet customers. “Everyone knows my son,” he said. “This is crazy. We must stop killing the children. Please help me.”

The boy’s family are Muslim immigrants from Uzbekistan who arrived in the United States about 12 years ago. Faridun was one of six siblings and attended New Utrecht High School, his friends said.

“Our family is very shaken up,” said Azat Jorayev, 39, who identified himself as a cousin of the boy’s father. “Today we lost our dear boy.”

He described Faridun as a “very good, calm boy,” an athlete with many friends.

“Please. We’re pleading,” Mr. Jorayev said in Russian. “Find the person who did this and punish him.”

Chief Essig said that about two hours before the shooting, Faridun had been with a group of students arguing with another group, which included the 17-year-old shooter. The older teenager “got into words” with a boy in Faridun’s group, and the two groups agreed to meet after school and have a fistfight, Chief Essig said.

When they met outside, the 17-year-old pulled out a gun and began firing.

Teenagers have become both the victims and the perpetrators of gun violence at a higher rate than adults since the pandemic.

A recent study of four major U.S. cities, including New York, found that the rate at which children were victims of gun violence had nearly doubled throughout the pandemic.

Teenagers in New York City have been arrested and charged with murder at a rate that grew twice as fast as the rate for adults between 2018 and 2022, according to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services. Forty-five children between the ages of 13 and 17 were arrested and charged with murder last year, nearly double the number in 2018, the state found.

New York police officials remarked on the trend earlier this month, after a spate of shootings over the Fourth of July weekend left a 15-year-old boy dead and injured a 5-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl.

So far this year there have been 62 victims of gun violence under the age of 18, and 14 percent of the city’s gun arrests this year have been of people under 18, the police said.

“Since 2020, we’ve seen increases that we’ve never seen before,” said Michael Lipetri, chief of crime control strategies. “From 2020 to present it’s the most youth-involved shootings that we’ve seen.”

Outside Faridun’s family home, Amber Brookes-Wagner, a 30-year-old actress, said she had moved to the leafier, quieter part of Brooklyn from Harlem because she thought there would be less gun violence.

“You don’t expect that in these more suburban neighborhoods,” she said.

But she said she has accepted that shootings are part of living in the city.

“You can’t live in fear,” Ms. Brookes-Wagner said.

Mansur Djahongirov, 37, who runs a trucking company, also immigrated to New York from Uzbekistan and said he would often get his hair cut at the barbershop that Faridun’s father runs. He described Faridun as “a very good kid” who always listened to his father and helped him at work.

Mr. Djahongirov expressed shock at the boy’s death. “He came here, had the potential future to be someone and it’s gone now,” he added. “It’s gone — that’s it. Someone took it.”

Daniel Fridman contributed reporting.

This piece was republished from The New York Times.