New York City was already in the middle of a brutal, bloody day when, at around 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, shots were fired from a car as it passed a park in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills section.
When the gunfire ended, another city resident’s life had been cut short in broad daylight: A 16-year-old boy Kleimer P. Mendez, lay dead on the sidewalk, shot in the head, the police said. Two others were also injured in the gunfire, and on Monday, one of them, Antonio Villa, died from his injuries as well.
The two teenagers were among eight people killed in violent crimes on Sunday, an exceptionally deadly 24 hours that came as New York City wrestles with a spike in shootings unlike anything it has seen in decades.
The trend has not shown signs of slowing, even though for weeks the police, community activists and elected officials have vowed to confront the rising tide of violence.
The triple shooting on Sunday was one of 15 shooting incidents that police officers responded to on Sunday. Of the eight people killed that day, seven were felled by bullets.
“When we have a day with 15 shootings in New York City, that’s not a success,” Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said Monday in an interview on NY1. “There’s no other way to put that.”
Through July 26, the city had 745 shootings, an increase of 73 percent from last year, when there were 431 in the same time period, the police said. Homicides rose by 29 percent, up to 227 from 176 last year. The victims included a 1-year old boy, Davell Gardner Jr., who was fatally shot when gunmen attacked people at a late-night cookout in Brooklyn on July 12.
The surge in New York City has been part of a larger trend of shootings in big American cities, including Chicago, Atlanta, Houston and Denver. The spike has since become entangled in a fractious debate over the future of policing, which was sparked by the killing of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis.
In New York, gun violence normally increases in the summer months, when warmer weather lures more people outside and tempers are rankled by sweltering weather. On Sunday, temperatures in the city climbed above 90 degrees and a heat advisory was put in effect in the afternoon.
But experts have said the violence has been especially brutal this year as the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the socioeconomic problems that often contribute to gun violence, including poverty, housing instability, unemployment and hunger.
Senior police officials and Mayor Bill de Blasio have also blamed the spike in gun violence on a slowdown in the court system caused by the pandemic.
On Monday, Mr. de Blasio again laid blame on the courts, calling for them to fully reopen as soon as possible. He said the city had seen a “huge backlog” of cases, with only half of firearms charges reaching the indictment stage.
Mr. de Blasio said he had sent a letter to the five district attorneys urging them to work together to restart the court system and asking what they need from him.
“We can solve our problems,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news briefing on Monday. “We have the ability to do it, but everyone has to come to the table.”
Lucian Chalfen, a spokesman for the state Office of Court Administration, said the courts were working to resume full operations and rebuked the mayor’s comments.
“While New York City still does not allow indoor dining, the Mayor blithely asks us to call in thousands of people a week citywide for jury duty,” Mr. Chalfen said. “Clearly he has absolutely no understanding of how the criminal justice process works.”
Commissioner Shea, joining Mr. de Blasio, also said that the Police Department was sending resources to areas of the city that had seen outbursts of gang violence. More than half of Sunday’s shootings took place in Brooklyn, he said.
But earlier on Monday, in his NY1 interview, Commissioner Shea cautioned that the Police Department had been taxed by both the rise in gun violence and continued protests against systemic racism and police brutality that have filled city streets this summer.
Over the weekend, the protests again brought hundreds of people to the streets in Brooklyn and Manhattan, many of them marching to support demonstrators facing off with federal law enforcement in Portland, Oregon.
Though the demonstrations in New York were largely peaceful, on Saturday night a man vandalized three police vehicles, breaking their windows, slashing their tires and tagging them with spray paint.
On Sunday, hundreds of protesters stopped traffic on the F.D.R. Drive in Manhattan. Fourteen people were arrested during marches over the weekend.
Senior police officials for weeks have pointed to the resources diverted to the protests as one reason for plummeting arrest numbers, though many elected officials have pushed back and accused officers of a work slowdown.
“Every available resource is being used to quell this gun violence,” Commissioner Shea said on Monday. “But there’s a lot of balls up in the air that we’re balancing.”
The violence on Sunday began shortly after midnight on Staten Island, where Grashino Yancy, 32, was shot in his right leg, the police said. Mr. Yancy was rushed to the hospital, but his injury was fatal.
Less than an hour later, the police rushed to an apartment building in the Bronx, where they found Kemar Soloman, 32, stabbed to death in the third-floor hallway.
More violence in the Bronx would come before sunrise. At around 3 a.m., the police found a man, 37, who has not been identified, fatally shot in the head in the Allerton neighborhood.
Then, at about 5:42 a.m., the police were called about an assault in the Bronx’s Belmont section. When they arrived, they found two men, 24 and 20, had both been shot. The older man, Juancarlos Ortega, had been shot in the head and was pronounced dead at the hospital, the police said. The younger man, shot in the groin, was in stable condition.
The police arrested Joam Casado, 39, and charged him with murder and weapon possession in the incident, officials said.
The afternoon brought a fifth homicide, this one in Queens. Just before 2:15 p.m., Shaka Ifill, 40, was shot in the back in a house in the Woodhaven neighborhood. Mr. Ifill, a Bronx resident, was taken to the hospital but did not succumb to his injury until four hours later, officials said.
The triple shooting in Cypress Hills brought two more deaths, those of Kleimer, the 16-year-old boy, and Mr. Villa, the 18-year-old.
“This is heartbreaking,” Mr. de Blasio said on Twitter on Sunday. “His life was just beginning.”
The police said that the three victims had been standing on the sidewalk when, after an argument, a gunman fired out of the moon roof of a sport utility vehicle.
Mr. Villa suffered a gunshot wound to the head and was taken to the hospital in critical condition. The third victim, a 17-year-old, was hit in the leg and was in stable condition.
Less than an hour after the park shooting, the police were called to an apartment building in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, where they found a man, 32, outside who had been fatally shot in the face and the chest, officials said. The man has not yet been identified.
Sean Piccoli, Alan Feuer and Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.
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