12-Year-Old Boy Is Charged in Killing of 14-Year-Old Cousin in Brooklyn

A 12-year-old boy was arrested on Sunday night after the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn earlier that day, the police said.

The 12-year-old was charged with second-degree manslaughter, also known as reckless homicide, and with criminally negligent homicide and criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree, the police said.

The police have not released the name of either boy. They were cousins and were in the living room of a family member’s apartment when the gun went off, a law enforcement official said.

The 12-year-old boy had been visiting the teenager at his home, on the fifth floor of an apartment building at 80 Osborn Street, where the older boy lived with his father, a firefighter, and his grandmother, said Mudhil Jeter, 40, a longtime resident of the building.

“It’s shocking,” said Mr. Jeter, who is friends with the teenager’s father. “He was a very good kid.”

The police said they received a 911 call about the shooting around 10:24 a.m. on Sunday. When they arrived at the building, in the Howard Houses complex, they found a 14-year-old boy who had been shot in the chest. He was unconscious and unresponsive.

He was taken to Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

Dushoun Almond, who runs Brownsville In Violence Out, an anti-violence organization in the neighborhood, said family members had told him the boys had been playing with the gun when it went off. It was unclear how the boys got the weapon.

“It was a fatal accident, but nonetheless, it was an accident,” Mr. Almond said.

On Monday morning, a small memorial had been set up outside the apartment building’s front door.

A flickering candle, dollar bills, chips and cookies had been placed below a sign taped to the wall that read “Young king!” and “We love you 4ever.”

No one answered the door at the teenager’s home.

Mr. Jeter, the family friend and neighbor, said he did not know the victim’s 12-year-old cousin, who had been visiting for the weekend when the shooting occurred.

Mr. Jeter, who lives on the second floor of the building, said he heard a loud boom on Sunday morning and initially thought that someone had fallen out of a window onto the scaffolding covering the building’s entrance.

“When I saw all the cops running into the building, I figured something had happened,” he said. “When I came outside, everyone was talking about it.”

Delois Hall, a Brooklyn resident who had been visiting her cousin at the Howard Houses over the weekend, said she heard a commotion outside on Sunday morning, then saw police cars arriving.

Sitting outside 80 Osborn Street on Monday, Ms. Hall said that the shooting had shaken the neighborhood.

“It hurts to know that they were so young,” she said. “Everybody’s talking about it, everybody.”

Mr. Jeter said that the victim would play basketball “all the time” in the basketball court near the building’s entrance.

“He’d come home from school, come outside and play basketball with his friends,” Mr. Jeter said. “He never got into any trouble.”

James Nicholson, a pastor and former resident of the building whose ministry is nearby, said his son and the victim’s father grew up together and he knew the man well.

The boy’s father is a firefighter at Engine Company 231 on Watkins Street, next to the Howard Houses.

“He’s coming back from vacation — got to come back to this, unfortunately,” Mr. Nicholson said. “This is a tragedy that kind of turns your whole world upside down.”

He added that the residents of the apartment building were close-knit, “like family.”

“I only moved away because my family got too big for that apartment,” he said. “But I always come back.”

In recent weeks, the police have expressed alarm at the number of teenagers who are being killed by other teenagers.

At a news conference last Wednesday, where Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, announced the takedown of a gang that had killed two teenagers in a three-year span, officials bemoaned the toll that gun violence was taking on children and teenagers in New York City and across the country.

“It’s a sad and shocking reality that the leading cause of death among children and teens in America is now gun violence,” Mr. Gonzalez said.

According to an analysis published by the journal Pediatrics last year, from 2011 through 2021, the rate of firearm fatalities among children under 18 increased by 87 percent in the United States. The death rate attributable to car accidents fell by almost half, leaving firearm injuries the top cause of accidental death in children.

The district attorney’s office said the Brownsville case would be handled by the city’s Family Court division, which takes on juvenile cases. A spokesman for that agency did not have an immediate comment on the case.

Mr. Almond said it was essential that law enforcement officials and outreach workers band together to help the 12-year-old boy, who “will have to live with this traumatic experience the rest of his life.”

“I don’t believe he should be locked away,” he said. “We can’t just let the system swallow him up.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.