Spate of teen gun deaths rattles NYC: ‘Something has to be done’

Tristan Sanders' aunt said the 15-year-old Bushwick resident had two main things on his mind before this past weekend: playing basketball and being a first-year high school student.

On Sunday, he headed to a memorial for Taearion Mungo, 16. Police say Mungo was shot near his home the previous day and died in the hospital. The boys were friends, according to Sanders’ aunt, Taniqua Quashie.

Sanders became the next victim in a rash of deadly gun violence that ultimately claimed the lives of five teenagers across New York City in just as many days, according to the NYPD. After the memorial, Sanders went with friends to NYCHA's Albany Houses in Crown Heights, where he was shot and killed around 7:15 p.m.

“It’s still so fresh. We’re still processing,” Quashie said at her building in Bushwick on Tuesday. Her sister, Sanders’ mother, was so distraught over losing her only child that she couldn’t talk to a reporter.

The first killing in the series took place early on Thursday, when 16-year-old Clarence Jones was shot and killed at West 124th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem around 1:30 a.m., police said. One of the bullets struck the front windshield of a passing car, sending the driver to the hospital with cuts from the shattered glass, according to the NYPD. One week later, police arrested a 15-year-old in that shooting, charging the teen with murder in the second degree.

Four more teens died on each of the following days: Malachi Deberry, 15, on Friday in Brownsville; Mungo on Saturday in Fort Greene; Sanders on Sunday in Crown Heights; and Joshua Sparrow, 18, on Monday in the Bronx’s Longwood neighborhood.

Four of the five victims were killed within a half-mile of their listed home addresses, and most were shot near areas that were hot spots for shootings between January 2020 and June 2024, Gothamist’s analysis of gun violence in New York City over that period shows. Police have so far made no arrests in any of the shootings besides the one that killed Jones, and said on Tuesday they were still investigating whether any of them were connected.

The spate of killings mostly occurred in northern and central Brooklyn, and all happened at night. They raised concerns among service providers known as community violence interrupters, who said they fear the shootings could spur more violence if the affected communities aren’t given enough resources to help other teens deal with the resulting trauma.

“When these types of traumas happen to our participants, our credible social worker will sit down with them and develop a full therapeutic plan to help them to process the violence that has happened to them,” said David Caba, senior vice president at the nonprofit Good Shepherd Services, which runs the Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence program. “If they don't get those services, you can kind of imagine what's going to happen to them going forward.”

Caba added that recurring shootings in a community can lead more young people to want to carry guns themselves.

“Their mentality changes completely, where it becomes a thing where they feel like they have to now consistently walk around with protection,” he said. Gothamist previously reported on a novel study that found an overwhelming majority of teens who carried guns in Brooklyn said they did so to protect themselves.

Gun violence has claimed the lives of 21 teens in New York City so far this year, according to NYPD data compiled by Gothamist. The five killed since last Thursday represent about a quarter of that total. By comparison, 23 teens were shot and killed in all of 2023. Overall, 172 people have been killed by gun violence citywide this year, according to Gothamist’s tracking.

Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence is part of a network of groups across New York City that use the “cure violence” method to intervene in incidents and prevent further harm. Caba said all of the teens killed in the last few days were shot in places outside of the network’s more than 30 “catchment areas,” meaning they won’t get immediate access to the resources those organizations provide.

On Tuesday morning, a group of teens clustered around a memorial of candles and balloons for Mungo, the 16-year-old gunned down on Saturday barely a block from his home in NYCHA's Ingersoll Houses. They declined to talk much about their friend, but one expressed doubt about the chances of bringing about justice for him.

“It’s sad. Something has to be done, because too many people are losing too many kids too young,” Quashie said. “I would hope that [the authorities] really put in the work to change what’s going on and to find out what happened to these kids.”

This story has been updated to reflect an arrest made in the death of Clarence Jones.