Ken Berwitz
A 14 year old boy, Christopher Duran, was shot down in the street and killed yesterday.
Though we do not know for sure, all indications are it was a specific hit job.
So what could anyone possibly have against this young 7th grade student?
Well, read the following excerpts from yesterday\’s article in the New York Post and you\’ll have your answer:
He flashed gang signs in selfies, posted a photo of a Smith & Wesson on his Facebook page, and had a rap sheet even a veteran street gangster could be proud of.
And now he\’s been murdered – at age 14.
Bronx seventh-grader Christopher Duran was stalked and gunned down on a sidewalk near his Bronx home Friday morning – the victim, cops believe, of gang violence.
“He was a gangbanger,” one law-enforcement source said of Christopher, a child known in his Morrisania neighborhood as already well on the road to doom when he was shot dead.
“He terrorized the neighborhood,” said a woman who passed by the grim crime scene.
“Christopher is no good,” another neighbor said.
Christopher had been walking to school with his little brother just a few paces from his Sheridan Avenue doorstep when his killer – who had been lying in wait with a lookout posted down the block – pulled a gun.
As the little brother watched, the gunman pumped a single bullet into Christopher\’s neck, sources said.
The gunman then stood over the youth\’s prone body and blasted away some more, striking the boy multiple times in the torso before he and the lookout both fled.
The boy\’s older brother is a “very active leader” in a notorious and violent gang known as 280, law-enforcement said.
Police do not suspect that Christopher was mistaken for his brother.
If the accounts in this article are true, the “hit man”, whatever his/her motives (and I would bet they are horrible) rid the world of a human crime wave.
If you read the entire article, you will find the requisite quotes from family members about what a good boy he was. His rap sheet (including assault using a brick), the fact that his facebook page had a picture of a Smith & Wesson with an extended cartridge, and his fondness for flashing gang signs tell a different story.
Will there be marches in the memory of Christopher Duran? Protesters in the streets? Memorial plaques like the one for Michael Brown? Nope. No racial or ethnic angle to exploit here; at least not that we know as yet.
But what if, while “he terrorized the neighborhood”, Christopher Duran had been shot by a cop? Maybe the one who knew him as a gangbanger?
Would the protesters be out? Would there be riots? Would he be characterized as nothing more than “another unarmed minority child”? Would New York City be hit with a whopping lawsuit by the grieving parents? Would the same interviewees who told us what a holy terror he was be in front of the cameras tellikng us “The cop didn\’t have to do that.“
Think about it.
