A 13-year-old boy was shot twice while walking to a store in South Jamaica, Queens early Wednesday, left with wounds to his back and left hand after a stranger approached him on the street. Police say the boy is in stable condition, but no arrests have been made and investigators have not determined why he was targeted.
According to ABC7 New York, the shooting happened on Rockaway Boulevard just before 12:35 a.m. Police officers responded to a 911 call around 12:30 a.m. Wednesday and found the teen at a home on Rockaway Boulevard and 145th Street, according to CBS News. The outlet reports he was taken to Long Island Children's Hospital, while ABC7 identifies the facility as Long Island Jewish Cohen Children's Medical Center; it is not clear from available reporting whether the two descriptions refer to the same hospital.
Investigators say the gunman was described as wearing all black and fled on foot northbound on 145th Street after the shooting, per the same ABC7 account. Police are looking for a male suspect, and per CBS New York, police sources said the shooting appeared to be unprovoked — a characterization attributed to those sources rather than a confirmed finding. No arrests have been made, and investigators have not determined a motive for the shooting, with the investigation described as ongoing.
A Troubling Echo From September
CBS New York reports that the shooting location appears to be an abandoned home, the same address where police responded on September 1 and found a 31-year-old woman with multiple stab wounds; she was pronounced dead at the scene. A separate Gothamist report on that incident described the location as an abandoned home on the corner of Rockaway Boulevard and 145th Street in South Jamaica, where EMS pronounced the woman dead at the scene and police made no immediate arrests. Nothing in the available reporting establishes any connection between the September stabbing and Wednesday's shooting — the two cases remain, as far as the record shows, separate.
Police are asking anyone with information to call the Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477), or in Spanish at 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The NYPD accepts tips through the Crime Stoppers website or by direct message on X at @NYPDTips, and keeps all calls confidential.
Part of a Broader Pattern in South Jamaica
Wednesday's shooting adds to a string of violence involving teenagers in the South Jamaica area over the past year. In April, 15-year-old Jaden Pierre was beaten and shot during a fight in Roy Wilkins Park, and an 18-year-old man was later arrested and charged in his killing, according to The New York Times. A Queens grand jury separately indicted a 16-year-old South Jamaica boy on murder charges tied to the fatal shooting of 13-year-old Sanjay Samuel in nearby Cambria Heights, per QNS. ABC7 also reported a 16-year-old boy was shot once in the leg near 155th Street and 118 Avenue in South Jamaica, and was taken to Cohen Children's Medical Center.
Citywide Numbers Tell a Mixed Story
Citywide, shooting incidents have been trending down: an NYPD announcement states that shooting incidents fell 11.6 percent compared with the previous year, with Brooklyn and Queens each recording their fewest shooting incidents on record for the first nine months of the year, at 159 and 61 respectively. But the picture among young people is more complicated. Gothamist reports that minors accounted for 120 shooting victims and 112 shooting suspects last year, and that the number of young people charged or identified in shootings nearly doubled from 2020 to 2021 and has not dropped below 100 in any year since, even as the overall number of young people shot in the city has fallen from a six-year peak of more than 150 in 2022.
The outlet also reported that youth-related crime in designated Youth Safety Zones has fallen by nearly half since September 2025, with shooting incidents and victims each down roughly 55 percent during deployment hours in those areas. For now, the investigation into Wednesday's shooting of the 13-year-old remains open, with police still searching for the man in black who ran from the scene.
