Seventeen alleged gang members responsible for a spate of shootings, including four murders, were charged in an 118-count indictment in Brooklyn on Tuesday, officials announced.
The defendants, 14 of whom are teenagers, are accused of hunting down rival gang members and committing a series of armed assaults, killing four people and wounding 10 in the process, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office said.
“One of the most disturbing aspects of this case is the age of the defendants in this indictment. Some of them were as young as 14 or 15 years old” when the crimes were committed, said Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez at a news conference.
“That is heartbreaking, that some of our youngest residents in our county are involved in this gang and gun violence … it’s devastating and it’s truly destructive.”
The alleged babyfaced killers are members of the YPF gang — an alliance of three street gangs in Brownsville, East New York and Fort Greene that banded together to increase their power as they waged a war against their enemies, prosecutors said.
Videos obtained throughout the investigation allegedly show the teens flaunting their guns in a series of social media posts, including one that depicts a defendant shoving a gun inside a puppy’s mouth as he holds the dog by its scruff.
“These videos really show, and they were all uncovered during the course of the investigation, how deeply ingrained the problem is, how this gang and gun culture has obsessed these young men. They wave these guns around. They show them off. They brag about them. These guns are in a way something that they think makes them men,” Gonzalez told reporters.
“It just shows how deep our challenge is to change the culture that we have in some parts of our community.”
Last October, Iquan Warlick, 17, and Nakhai Addison, 17, allegedly shot and killed college freshman Sherard McKoy, 18, while he was inside an East New York bodega waiting for food alongside an alleged rival of the two teens, prosecutors said.
About a month later, Warlick, George Risher Jr., 17, and two other unidentified individuals allegedly traveled to a 16-year-old’s birthday party to target rival gang members and shot five innocent partygoers, including Daijyonna Long, 20, who was killed, investigators said.
Most recently, a 19-year-old NYU student was allegedly shot in the arm by Giovanni Bennett, 17, while standing outside the school’s Jacobs Building at the MetroTech Center — just steps from Brooklyn Borough Hall, prosecutors said.
“These guns were in the hands of bad people that did bad things to good people. The number of innocent people, bystanders, is unbelievable, the devastation that was carried out in this city,” said newly minted Mayor Eric Adams, who attended the press conference.
“You decimate a community’s ability to believe in being safe when you have violence of this magnitude.”
The defendants, who range in age from 17 to 23, are facing a series of charges, including murder, conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder.
Fourteen have been taken into custody and another three are outstanding, the DA’s office said. Their attorneys couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
