There were no protests. No murals. No national outrage.
There was just a baby with a bullet in his stomach. And he died.
Our friends at Fox News detail the killing of the innocent child:
The father of a 1-year-old boy who was fatally shot at a family cookout in Brooklyn Sunday night pleaded for answers on "Hannity" Monday before sharing a powerful message for the "cowards" responsible.
"You took my son's life," Davell Gardner Sr. told Fox News contributor Lawrence Jones. "I can't get that back. I can't hold him no more. I can't hear him calling me 'daddy' no more. I can't kiss him no more. I can't play with him no more.
"I've got to put my son in the ground now," he continued. "He's only one. His birthday is in two months. He didn't live to see two. He didn't live life. It's like, I wanted to get him out of this violence before something like this happened."
Davell Gardner Jr., was seated on a small chair at the cookout when two men approached the gathering just before midnight and began shooting from across Raymond Bush Park in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, police said.
Davell was shot in the stomach and succumbed to his wounds at a local hospital early Monday.
Davell's grandmother, Samantha Gardner, shared a message of her own for the "cowards" responsible.
"For the cowards that did this, you should be ashamed of yourself because everybody talks about Black Lives Matter. What about baby lives? What about teenager lives?" she asked. "You took an innocent child from [his] mother and father as well as the grandparents and I don't think it's fair.
"You can go to hell," the grieving grandmother said pointedly. "Excuse my expression, but you took something that was precious for me, precious for my son, something precious for his mother, and we will never see him. He cannot come back. He cannot wake back up. He was an innocent little baby and he's gone forever."
Gardner Sr. said he is certain members of his community have information about the shooting, but have remained silent.
"Do you believe based on what you know now and no one's talking, that people thought that your son's life mattered, by the way they are conducting themselves right now?" Jones asked.
" No," Gardner Sr. replied, "and anybody who says that, they are just lying because if you know information, that needs to be said. This is my son. He died. Whatever information you know, you need to tell me. It needs to be known. I need this information. Because these guys just took my son's life. For what? He didn't do nothing to nobody."
Asked whether he thought elected officials were sufficiently protecting his neighborhood, Gardner Sr. said, "The community is just getting worse and worse."
Mayor De Blasio was too busy spending his weekend painting on 5th Avenue sidewalks to realize his criminally dangerous policing policies were already beginning to destroy his city after just a few weeks of enacting them.
Why doesn't this man disgust New Yorkers?
Perhaps he's just too criminally delusional to realize what he has done to the people he is supposed to protect.
He says all the right things for the camera though:
As noted by The New York Times, the killing of Davell is just one tragedy in the unfolding drama going on in the city:
Davell’s death came during another grim weekend of gun violence in the city, where shootings in June and July are up sharply compared with the same period last year, a spike that has helped push the overall number for the year higher.
As of July 12, there had been 634 shootings in 2020, compared with 394 in 2019. At that pace, the city would top 800 shootings for the year. It would be the first time in three years that the city had reached that number.
lice said.Credit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times
Twenty-eight people died of gunshot wounds in June, the police said. The trend continued into this month, with 20 more people fatally shot through July 12.
The spike in shootings has come as city residents and officials engage in a fierce debate over the future of policing, a discussion prompted by large-scale demonstrations over police brutality and institutional racism, including in the criminal justice system.
Since late May, protesters angered by the killing in police custody of George Floyd in Minneapolis and officer-involved shootings elsewhere have taken to city streets, calling for sweeping police reforms.
Last month, New York State banned chokeholds and repealed a law that kept police disciplinary records secret. City officials, responding to calls to defund the police, agreed in principle to shift roughly $1 billion from the Police Department to other agencies.
Senior police officials and leaders of the city’s police unions argued against the moves, saying that they would hobble the department’s ability to deter violent crime, especially with shootings on the rise.
Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, who oversaw the Brooklyn North patrol borough before a recent promotion put him in charge of the Police Department’s Community Affairs bureau, appealed for an end to the violence in a Twitter message early Monday, saying, “This. Must. STOP!”
Experts on crime say that an increase in shootings, which other U.S. cities have experienced, is an annual summer occurrence that is more acute this year because of the strain the pandemic has put on the economy and on people’s living conditions.
But senior police officials, including Commissioner Shea, have sought to link the uptick in shootings to recent changes in the criminal justice system, including court delays caused by the virus, a new bail law and other measures meant to reduce the jail population.
Crime data provided by the police, however, has not shown a strong connection between the violence and those factors. Chief Michael LiPetri, the police chief in charge of crime statistics, said in an interview with The New York Daily News that just seven out of 2,100 people released from jail with pending gun charges had been linked to shootings since their release.
Although murders and shootings have risen, reports of other four other major crimes — rape, robbery, felony assault and grand larceny — are either flat or down sharply so far this year. Burglaries and car thefts have surged during the pandemic, with thieves targeting empty restaurants and unattended vehicles.
Some elected officials and activists who support shrinking the Police Department and fundamentally changing its practices have repeatedly sought to counter the argument that efforts to reduce the jail population is behind the increase in shootings. They point to another possible factor: that most shootings still go unsolved by the police.
On Monday, Mr. de Blasio again said he believed that the rise in shootings was being fueled by the “horrible dislocation” caused by the pandemic, which ravaged the city’s economy and upended its courts and jails.
“The N.Y.P.D. has been overloaded in so many ways and it just keeps adding up,” the mayor said. “And most importantly, the criminal justice system is not functioning yet.”
On Monday, at a news conference near where Davell was fatally shot, Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, said that officials should have been better prepared for the wave of gun violence.
“Everything in these communities has been made worse by the pandemic,” Mr. Williams said. “Everything. Why did you think gun violence would be different?”
The Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams, a former police captain, urged the police to step up their investigations of recent shootings and to collaborate with neighborhood organizations to stem the violence.
“I want the same level of attention and dedication, because you are sworn to serve and protect this city,” Mr. Adams said, referring to the police. He added: “We want the apprehension of the person involved in taking the life of this 1-year-old child.”
As he spoke, Davell’s family gathered in front of an apartment building that faces the park. Several officers stood watch, while people spoke quietly and exchanged hugs. One young mother handed a candle and two balloons to an officer.
“Could you give this to the family?” she said.
Mr. de Blasio and Robert E. Cornegy Jr., the City Council member who represents the area, arrived later and spoke with Davell’s mother. Mr. Cornegy said the woman was still wearing the bloody clothes she had on as she carried her wounded son.
“There were just tears streaming down her face,” Mr. de Blasio said afterward. “I just told her that we’re here for her, and none of us can imagine what she’s going through.”
If the paper had any integrity left they would be placing the blame right at the feet of De Blasio.
And if I had a million dollars I'd be rich.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article mischaracterized certain remarks by Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president. When Mr. Adams said, "I don't want to hear a conversation about a slowdown in policing," he was saying that such a conversation was less urgent than the police doing their jobs. He was not defending the police against accusations that they had eased up on enforcement after weeks of protests and criticism."
The above is yet another correction the paper had to make and further proof they're more concerned with political activism than the truth.
Unfortunately little Davell was just a victim in the city government's political games, they should all be put in hand cuffs, but instead children keep getting put in the ground.
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