Seventeen teenagers and young adults were charged on Jan. 4, 2022, in Brooklyn, New York, for the deadly shootings of four people and leaving 10 others wounded in the shootings. Authorities say that the 17 belonged to three street gangs, and joined together to expand their territory and increase their access to guns.
“One of the most disturbing aspects of this case is the age of the defendants in this indictment,” said Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez at a news conference. “Some of them were as young as 14 or 15 years old when the crimes were committed.”
Gonzalez says that the alliance of the gangs was behind more than a dozen shootings, which included a New York University student being shot in the arm in Downtown Brooklyn in September 2021. Another college student was killed in a shooting in October 2020, and though he wasn’t the intended target, he was an alleged rival of the gunmen.
Twenty-year-old Daijyonna Long, a victim of the gang’s alleged attacks on their rivals, died after being shot at a birthday party in November 2020.
Through the investigations of the gang members, there are videos that showed the teens flaunting guns, including shoving a gun into a dog’s mouth.
Mayor Eric Adams said at the news conference that the kind of takedown that resulted in the arrests of the 17 teens should be made across all of New York City.
“We’re not going to live in a culture of violence and we won’t be defined by the crisis of violence,” Adams said at the news conference. “That is not who we are as a city. We deserve better, and today, the district attorney showed us that we’re going to get better.”
