The boy, Samuel Joseph, was a sophomore at the High School for Youth and Community Development on the Erasmus Hall campus and one of eight siblings from a family of Haitian immigrants. He was leaving his apartment building to get something to eat around 5:45 p.m. when he was confronted in the lobby by the gunman.
He was shot in the face, head and chest, and died at a nearby hospital, the police said.
His killing was the latest in an increasingly violent year in New York City, and Brooklyn in particular. As of Feb. 17, there had been 48 homicides in the city this year, up from 31 during the same period in 2018.
That increase has been driven mostly by killings in Brooklyn, where there have been at least 15 more homicides compared with this point last year.
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Surveillance video recovered by the police from nearby businesses showed two young men stopping and speaking to one of Samuel’s sisters in front of their building, Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte, a Democrat whose district includes the neighborhood, said Saturday.
“His sister was walking down the street, and you can see these two men have a conversation with her and apparently asked where her brother was,” said Bichotte, who had spoken to one of Samuel’s sisters and watched the video. “One guy stood outside, and one came inside, did the shooting and left.”
No arrests have been made and a motive for the shooting was not immediately clear.
“This was planned, but I don’t know if it was the right target,” Bichotte said.
The shooting happened on a busy Friday evening when the neighboring businesses — a barbershop, a tattoo parlor, a package shipping center — were full of customers.
Fabian Mora, a tattoo artist who works two doors down from Samuel’s building, said that for the past few years Samuel would come into his shop and watch people get tattooed. “He used to joke with us and say, ‘I want to get a tattoo,’ and we would tell him he was too young,” Mora said.
Frank Joseph, who played basketball with Samuel at the YMCA gym just steps down the street, crouched in front of a sidewalk memorial of candles and a note-laden poster of his friend. He remembered him as a skilled point guard.
“I knew him before he could even speak English,” said Joseph, who was not related to the victim. “He was a good kid.”
A number of youth homicides have stunned the city recently, notably the brutal stabbing of Lesandro Guzman-Feliz in the Bronx last summer and the shooting of Oluwadurotimi Joseph Oyebola on a Brooklyn basketball court in September.
Samuel’s family — he was one of five sons and three daughters — came to the United States about 10 years ago. Relatives were too distraught to speak to reporters Saturday.
“They came here for opportunity, and a young man was gunned down,” Bichotte, the assemblywoman, said. “You have a family that’s trying to capture the American dream, and then something like this happens.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.