A 16-year-old boy has been charged with shooting to death an even younger teen in Brooklyn after asking the victim what gang he belonged to, police said Thursday.
The 15-year-old victim, Unique Smith, had no gang ties, police said.
Unique was confronted by two masked teens as he sat on a park bench with two girls inside McLaughlin Park in Downtown Brooklyn on the first day of school, about 1:30 p.m. Sept. 7, police said.
They argued, then got into a fight, with one pulling out a gun and shooting Unique in the abdomen as about 30 people visiting the park, children included, ran for cover.
Responding cops performed CPR on Unique until medics and rushed him to New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, where he died, police said.
The suspect was arrested Wednesday and charged with murder and gun possession. He has no previous arrests.
The suspect's name was not released by the NYPD because he's a juvenile.
The arrest comes amidst a rash of violence across the city involving young people, including a 15-year-old boy, Josue Lopez-Ortega, fatally shot Jan. 19 as he left the PAL building in the Longwood section of the Bronx.
Unique, who lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was a student at Brooklyn Laboratory Charter Schools, two blocks from the park.
"You was better off taking my life for his," Smith's devastated mother, Dominque Simmons, posted on Facebook after he was killed. "Why save me and not him?"
"I never thought I will lose you so early," she wrote in another post. "This the worst pain ever. I love you. We fight, so what? I want you here. This world wasn't ready for you to leave. You my first child, you my heart‚ you are me. Why you? Why my son? Why him?"
