The 16-year-old boy caught with a loaded gun at a Queens highschool Thursday was slapped with costs, officers introduced Friday as they revealed that the weapon marked certainly one of 4,000 taken off town’s streets to this point this 12 months.
The Benjamin Cardozo Excessive College pupil was charged with legal possession of a weapon and making a terroristic risk as an adolescent offender after cops discovered him toting a semi-automatic handgun in his backpack, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch advised reporters at a morning press convention.
The 9-millimeter Taurus GX4 – loaded with 13 rounds within the journal – was seized simply over two hours after the teenager allegedly posted an ominous Instagram picture threatening that he was “Boutta Shoot the College Up.”
The swift investigation additionally led cops to the teenager’s bed room, the place two extra 9-mm bullets have been discovered that have been appropriate with the weapon, Tisch stated.
The weapon was discovered to have been “bought legally by a licensed firearm allow holder in South Carolina on January 9, 2025, making the time-to-crime 252 days,” the highest cop stated.
The Joint Firearms Process Drive – which incorporates the NYPD and the ATF – has opened up an investigation to find out how the weapon made its means from South Carolina to Queens, she stated.
Tisch, alongside Mayor Eric Adams, touted the recovered weapon as a part of an even bigger accomplishment for the NYPD to this point in 2025.
“This 12 months, we eliminated 4,000 unlawful weapons off our streets, and a kind of weapons was eliminated yesterday with a 16-year-old youngster that was in possession,” Adams stated. “Stopping the movement of weapons is one thing that we’d like our federal companions to assist us [with], however what the police division is doing every single day – zeroing in on unlawful weapons – the weapons that we take away [are] saving lives.”
Tisch referred to as the milestone the “results of persistent, extremely proficient precision police work,” noting that for the previous 8-and-a-half months, NYPD officers seized a mean of 15 unlawful weapons per day.
In all of 2024, a complete of 6,150 unlawful weapons have been faraway from town’s streets, and 4,061 individuals have been busted for gun possession, in accordance with the year-end crime statistics.
And greater than 23,700 unlawful weapons have been taken off the road for the reason that begin of Adams’ administration in 2022, the mayor stated Friday.
“These are 23,000 weapons that aren’t going for use to hurt harmless individuals, take the lives of members of the family, kill or maim our cops and numerous numbers of people who find themselves victimized by gun violence,” Hizzoner added.
The announcement got here days after the mayor’s administration report revealed that main crimes in New York Metropolis dropped almost throughout the board, with six of seven main felony classes seeing marked declines.
Tisch and Adams on Friday credited focused NYPD deployments in its notoriously high-crime “summer time violence discount zones,” gang takedowns, and “upstream options” reminiscent of applications for the youth and the previously incarcerated for serving to to stifle the violence.
However the mayor referred to as on the legal justice system to do its half to maintain violent offenders behind bars.
“Every gun we take off the road has a constructive and protecting influence that ripples out throughout our metropolis and uplifts each side of our lives, however each firearm taking off our road is just one a part of the journey,” he stated. “The legal justice system is made up of a number of parts. We’d like our lawmakers and our judges to do their job…It will possibly’t proceed to be a revolving door every time we’ve got a capturing and see an extended listing of gun costs on an individual who dedicated the capturing.”
“That sends a horrible message that we’re not taking this violence critically,” he added. “We’re doing in order cops – as disaster administration groups – we’re asking the opposite components of this method [to] do your job. Let’s make sure that harmful individuals don’t undergo the revolving cycle of being again on our road.”
