9/2/2013
By SHEILA ANNE FEENEY AND IVAN PEREIRA
Discussing the shocking slay of a toddler in his stroller, Mayor Michael Bloomberg Monday pushed for tighter gun laws and to excoriate those who sought to rein in the NYPD’s stop and frisk strategy.
“A misguided ruling from a Federal judge and two bills passed by the City Council will make it harder for the NYPD to continue to reduce shootings and violent crimes, which primarily occur in minority communities, as we saw last night,” the mayor said Monday at the West Indian-American Day Parade in remarks addressing the shooting of 16-month-old Antiq Hennis.
No suspects were named by press time.
While trumpeting that the city’s murder rate is at an all-time low, “the constant flow of illegal guns into our city and into the hands of criminals,” was caused solely by “broken federal gun laws that Washington refuses to fix and broken gun laws in many states,” which permit weapons to pass into the hands of NYC criminals, Bloomberg said.
The father of baby Antiq, Anthony Hennis, 22, who had more than a dozen arrests, many of them sealed, is not cooperating with police to find his child’s killer and was the likely intended target for the bullets, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said in a back and forth with reporters. But “we have some leads and those leads are being aggressively followed,” Kelly said. Kelly said the father’s arrests involved drugs and weapons possession charges. Several of the other unsealed arrests involved driving with a suspended license and marijuana, a police source said later.
Antiq Hennis, who lived on Riverdale Ave. with his mother, Cherise Miller, 20, was pronounced dead at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center.
