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A 20-year-old woman died after being shot in the head while pushing her 3-month-old in a stroller in Manhattan’s Upper East Side Wednesday night. The toddler wasn’t injured.
New York City Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said in a news conference that the victim was pushing the stroller when a man approached from behind and “fired a single shot into her head from a very close range,” then fled.
The victim was rushed to a hospital and pronounced dead about an hour later, Sewell said. She was identified Thursday as 20-year-old Azsia Johnson of Staten Island.
“Azsia didn’t deserve this,” family friend Ebony Paulin told CBS News York. “I don’t think nobody would want [to] hurt Azsia because she’s a good person.”
CBS New York
The suspect remains at large. Sources told CBS New York that police do not believe it was a random shooting, and consider the father of the child — a 22-year-old man with a criminal record — a person of interest.
Those sources said that detectives have obtained surveillance video of Johnson meeting with the child’s father at some point prior to the shooting.
Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Eric Adams also spoke at Wednesday’s news conference, and pointed to the “problem of the over-proliferation of guns on our streets.”
“When a woman is pushing a baby carriage down the block, and is shot at point-blank range, it shows just how this national problem is impacting families,” Adams said. “It doesn’t matter if you are on the Upper East Side, or East New York, Brooklyn. The oversaturation of guns endangers people.”
