On the first sweltering night of the season, violence broke out across the city, with seven people stabbed, one fatally, and 12 shot – all in the space of seven hours, police said.
In the most serious incident, Waskar Tejeda, 27, stabbed a 23-year-old man to death in a fight over money in The Bronx early yesterday.
The victim, Juan Reyes, was pronounced dead at Barnabas Hospital. The suspect was arrested at Bronx Lebanon Hospital, where he had gone for treatment of a stab wound to his arm suffered during the confrontation, which occurred at 2:30 a.m. on Bathgate Avenue.
As a wave of heat and humidity blanketed the city Friday night, violence erupted, beginning at 9p.m., when a teenage boy opened fire with a handgun on a basketball court in the Melrose section of The Bronx, badly wounding a 12-year-old boy and a 22-year-old man.
The shooting sent scores of cops in bulletproof vests and helicopters on a frantic search for the suspect, who by late yesterday was still being sought.
With the boy, Edwin Sanderson, unable to talk, and the older victim, Pascual Zamore, not cooperating with police, it was still not clear late yesterday what prompted the shooting or if the shooting victims were the intended targets.
The shooting set in a motion a series of other shootings and stabbings over the next seven hours in Brooklyn, The Bronx and Queens. Police made arrests only in one of the stabbings.
The shooting victims include a 35-year-old man critically wounded when another man confronted him in Bedford-Stuyvesant and shot him in the head, and a 25-year-old man who was clinging to life late yesterday after he was shot numerous times in the chest and head by another man in Flatbush.
Two women with the 25-year-old man were also shot, but they suffered only minor injuries, police said.
Also not badly hurt were a 25-year-old man shot while sitting inside his car in Mott Haven, a 19-year-old shot in the head on Eastern Parkway and a 22-year-old man shot in the foot in Bushwick. Another man was also pistol-whipped in the incident.
Three other victims, in Jamaica, East New York and Fort Greene, were shot in the leg.
Of the surviving stabbing victims, the most seriously hurt was a 21-year-old who was in critical condition after being attacked in Bedford-Stuyvesant Friday night.
The rest of the stabbing victims were not badly hurt.