A 20-year-old man was shot twice in the chest just before 11:30 a.m. Thursday outside the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club in Castle Hill, and the two masked gunmen responsible sped off together on a single lime green scooter, according to police. The victim was rushed to the hospital in stable condition, while investigators are still searching for the shooters and have not released any information about what sparked the violence.
Police say the shooting happened at 625 Castle Hill Avenue, right outside the youth club’s doors, as reported by News 12 Bronx. Officers responding to the scene found the man suffering from gunshot wounds to the chest, and paramedics transported him to Jacobi Medical Center, which serves as the primary Level I adult and pediatric trauma center for the East Bronx, per Norwood News. The two masked men were last seen heading southbound on Castle Hill Avenue before disappearing from the area.
A Community Hub Turned Crime Scene
The address where the shooting unfolded is more than just a street corner — it sits inside the NYCHA Castle Hill Houses public housing development and hosts both the NYCHA Castle Hill Senior Center and the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club’s Castle Hill unit, according to NYC Open Data. The Boys & Girls Club itself traces back to 1915, when it was founded in Manhattan to curb youth gang activity, before expanding into the Bronx in 1969 and opening its Castle Hill location in 2005, per 1Climb. The same grounds are also home to the Roxanne Reid Memorial Garden, a green space built in 2020 by GrowNYC and local residents to honor a former tenant association leader and provide fresh produce for the housing complex, according to GrowNYC Education.
Another Scooter Getaway in Castle Hill
Thursday’s shooting is not the first time gunfire and a two-wheeled getaway have struck this stretch of Castle Hill Avenue this year. On June 5, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the same neighborhood, with two suspects escaping on a single motorized scooter, a case Hoodline previously reported. The tactic mirrors a broader citywide pattern of drive-by shootings carried out on unregistered mopeds and scooters, which let perpetrators flee quickly while concealing their identities — a trend serious enough that law enforcement task forces have crushed more than 41,000 confiscated two-wheelers citywide as of 2025-2026, according to the Queens District Attorney’s Office.
The Castle Hill Houses complex has seen other violence in recent memory. In November 2025, an apartment murder-suicide left four family members dead after police responded to a 911 call reporting morning gunfire inside a fifth-floor unit, News 12 Bronx reported at the time.
Precinct’s Falling Crime Numbers Meet Persistent Gun Violence
The shooting falls within the NYPD’s 43rd Precinct, which covers Castle Hill, Soundview, and Parkchester and which posted the city’s largest absolute drop in major felonies of any command in midyear 2026, recording 368 fewer reported crimes than the year before, according to the NYC Midyear Crime Report. Yet shooting incidents specifically have moved in the opposite direction: NYPD figures showed 31 shooting cases in the precinct by December 2025, up from 23 during the same period in 2024, per News 12 Bronx…