BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Two teenage boys were indicted Tuesday in the shooting death of a 3-year-old who was killed while riding his tricycle outside his Buffalo home last week, officials said. The toddler's 7-year-old sister was wounded.
“Literally, babies killing babies,” Mayor Byron Brown said as city leaders announced the charges against a 14-year-old and 16-year-old at an evening news conference.
Three-year-old Ramone Carter and Jamia Griffin, 7, were not the intended targets as the suspects fired toward another young person about 9:30 p.m. on June 21, acting Erie County District Attorney Michael Keane said.
The children's mother, Shakenya Griffin, told The Buffalo News the next morning that she heard gunshots and ran outside to look for her children.
“He ran right to me, and he was full of blood,” she said. “I collapsed in my neighbor’s grass and said call 911.”
Keane said each of the teenagers fired an illegal gun, one of them a pistol and the other a revolver. Both boys were arraigned on charges of murder, attempted murder, assault and weapons possession and were being held without bail in a youth detention facility. The older boy would be sentenced as an adult if convicted, the prosecutor said.
The teenagers' names were withheld because of their ages.
Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia credited the cooperation of witnesses in leading police to the suspects, recalling how officers arriving on the scene had rushed Ramone to the hospital themselves in the hope of saving him.
“They were able to get that poor baby in a police car, race the baby to (Erie County Medical Center) to try to give him a fighting chance,” Gramaglia said. “Unfortunately, we all know that that wasn’t the outcome. The baby was declared dead at the hospital.”
Keane declined to comment on a possible motive when asked whether the shootings may have been gang-related.
“It appeared that they were targeting someone else," Brown said. "But the fact that these children had guns and were so willing to use them indiscriminately is what brings us to this point today.”
The Associated Press
