A 16-year-old Guyanese girl was shot dead while babysitting her little cousin inside their Brooklyn, New York apartment yesterday and law enforcers are looking for her boyfriend, police sources said, according to the New York Daily News.
Shemel Mercurius moved four years ago from Guyana to the East Flatbush apartment she shared with her aunt and cousin, relatives said, according to the newspaper’s online edition.
The teen was with her boyfriend, supervising 3-year-old Josia, when gunfire rang out and she was hit several times just before 6 p.m. in the sixth-floor apartment in the Flatbush Gardens on Brooklyn Ave. near Foster Ave., police sources told the newspaper.
Rescuers found Shemel semi-conscious and rushed her to Kings County Hospital, but she couldn’t be saved.
Josia was unharmed in the bloodshed, cops said.
Shemel’s parents still live in Guyana, said her grandmother, Joan Mercurius, 70.
“I haven’t been able to reach her parents,” she said. “We brought her here for a better life. We hoped she could go to college”, the grandmother told the newspaper.
About two weeks ago, the report said that Shemel’s grandfather took away her phone “because of some boy”.