The murder rate in the 49th Precinct took an unexpected jump at the beginning of the month, when a victim, who was shot in 1996, died.
According to officials with the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner, when Dudley Mapp died last month, it was due to a shooting that happened at his home on August 24, 1996. He died from infectious complications stemming from a remote gunshot wound in the chest, so it was ruled a homicide.
“If he had not had that gunshot wound, he wouldn’t have died from those complications,” said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman with the Bronx office. “If someone dies of complications from whatever happened, it’s automatically a homicide.”
According to information provided by the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, Mapp was shot by his wife, Sharon Mapp, in their home on 2515 Olinville Avenue.
The DA did not have information about what led up to the shooting, but said Sharon was sentenced to two to four years in jail on December 3, 1996 in connection with the incident.
DA officials are reviewing whether she will be brought up on murder charges, now that her former husband has died.
Although there have been 10 murders in the precinct so far this year, this was the first to occur in several months, and precinct Captain Kevin Nicholson has been speaking at community meetings to ensure people are not overly worried about the statistic.
“I don’t want people to think ‘Oh my, somebody just got killed’,” he said. “This happened 15 years.”
He said the increased murder rate will not have an affect on the precinct. However, Community Council president Joe Thompson said he does not want the perception of the precinct to change because of the fluke murder statistic.
“Things have stabilized,” he said. “You always try to have better numbers than the year before; and arrests are way up, even proportionally to the crime, which is also up.”
