Tristan Sanders’ aunt said the 15-year-old Bushwick resident had two main things on his mind before this past weekend: playing basketball and being a first-year high school student.
On Sunday, he headed to a memorial for Taearion Mungo, 16. Police say Mungo was shot near his home the previous day and died in the hospital. The boys were friends, according to Sanders’ aunt, Taniqua Quashie.
Sanders became the next victim in a rash of deadly gun violence that ultimately claimed the lives of five teenagers across New York City in just as many days, according to the NYPD. After the memorial, Sanders went with friends to NYCHA’s Albany Houses in Crown Heights, where he was shot and killed around 7:15 p.m.
“It’s still so fresh. We’re still processing,” Quashie said at her building in Bushwick on Tuesday. Her sister, Sanders’ mother, was so distraught over losing her only child that she couldn’t talk to a reporter.
The first killing in the series took place early on Thursday, when 16-year-old Clarence Jones was shot and killed at West 124th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem around 1:30 a.m., police said. One of the bullets struck the front windshield of a passing car, sending the driver to the hospital with cuts from the shattered glass, according to the NYPD. Police have neither publicly identified a motive for the shooting nor made any immediate arrests.