On Monday, a late-afternoon drive-by shooting severely injured a 20-year-old man, who was shot in the head outside state Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie’s Gun Hill Road constituency office in the East Bronx. An oft-busy office teeming with staffers and constituents, Monday’s shooting was a sanguineous scene, marked off by police tape and the victim’s bloodstained baseball cap.
The speaker confirmed that he was in Albany at the time of the shooting, and on Tuesday, the longtime lawmaker called for stricter actions to address gun proliferation and violence. Heastie is currently in the thick of state budget talks — originally due April 1 but has since been extended three times by state lawmakers — with debates brewing over Gov. Kathy Hochul’s changes to the state’s bail law, a housing plan and other policy issues the governor had included in her budget proposal.
“Sadly, in this instance, another young person of color has fallen victim to gun violence,” said Heastie in a statement. “As I have said repeatedly, we must stop focusing on the symptoms of crime and treat the disease. We must address the scourge of guns and gun violence plaguing our country, and this is yet another example of the urgent need to act.”
As many as 10 shots were fired from a white BMW sedan on Gun Hill Road and Fenton Avenue at around 3 p.m., with multiple gunmen targeting the unidentified 20 year old, who was brought to Jacobi Medical Center in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head. His condition was later upgraded to stable, sources said.
According to police sources, a staffer in Heastie’s 1446 Gun Hill Road office called police after the shots were fired.
This isn’t the first shooting to take place outside a Bronx constituency office. Last May, two separate shootings occurred in consecutive weeks outside the Morris Avenue constituency office of City Councilmember Pierina Sanchez.
Just four months into 2023 and gun violence is at a record pace in the U.S., as the Gun Violence Archive reports 11,523 people have died from gun violence year to date. It has been a week since the deadly mass shooting at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, and there have been more than a dozen since, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The Bronx has seen the number of shooting incidents and victims drop over the past year. At this time last year, the Bronx reported 114 shooting incidents that impacted 126 victims. As of Tuesday, the Bronx reports 81 shooting incidents, impacting 66 victims, a year-over-year decline of 35% and 42%, respectively.
A recent survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that gun violence more broadly has affected most families in the U.S. in one way or another. Nearly 1 in 5 adults has had a family member killed by a gun, including in homicide and suicide, and about 1 in 6 has witnessed an injury from a gun.
Reach Robbie Sequeira at rsequeira@schnepsmedia.com or (718) 260-4599. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes.
