Scooter-riding ‘bad boys’ terrorizing a Bronx apartment complex are responsible for shooting a 15-year-old girl and leaving her with horrific injuries on Monday, according to her grandmother, who called on police to ‘stop these kids . ”
Paytton King, a freshman at Grace H. Dodge Career and Technical School — which is part of a local violence prevention program — was struck by a vagrant at 183rd Street and Crotona Avenue in Belmont around 6:45 p.m., according to police and her grandmother Pamela Koning, 57.
The bullet “split her pelvis” and she was rushed to Jacobi Medical Center, where she is listed in stable condition and undergoing surgery.
According to her grandmother, Payton was still in the hospital on Tuesday afternoon.
“She’s not talking right now. She’s in a tube,” King said. “She still has to undergo surgery. [The bullet] travels in her body.”
“It was in her back and now it’s in the front, just like her stomach,” she added. ‘She’s just lying there now, sad. She’s sleeping.”
According to police sources, she was not the intended target.
Paytton is “a sweet young girl” who “loves sports,” King said. She was with her siblings and friends near her apartment complex when the suspects zoomed past and flew in circles, her grandmother said.
Her grandmother was getting out of a taxi when they zoomed past her and she heard the shots.
“It was a lot. It didn’t stop,” King recalled. “They were bad boys who rode scooters. I see them when they drive past me.”
“They were just shooting randomly in the complex. [Paytton] was on her cell phone.”
Pamela said several people — including her own daughter — called police earlier in the day to report the scooter-riding teens, but no one showed up until Paytton was shot.
“They just do it all the time,” she said. “They come through the block and [shoot] and keep going. That’s something fun to do.”
“[Neighbors] said these guys drove around the block and drove around 15 to 20 times like they were looking for someone,” King added. “And finally, I think, when it got darker, they shot at the gate. They left. They ran away.”
No arrests had been made as of early Tuesday evening.
“They just need to be caught,” the teen’s grandmother said. “They need to be addressed because this is not the end. They just keep doing it.”
“Someone has to stop these kids,” King said. “It’s sad. They should do something productive with their lives. They ride scooters and shoot people with guns.”
Now she is calling on the young suspects to ‘pay attention’.
“They’re coming for you, the police,” King said. ‘Now you have to answer them. Why [are] Are you that angry? Get an education, a job and a life. How about that?”
Shootings in the NYPD’s 48th precinct, which covers the area of Monday’s violence, have increased this year, according to the latest data, updated Sunday.
28 shooting incidents with 33 victims have been reported, compared to 22 shooting incidents with 30 victims in the same period in 2023.
Violence disruptor Steve Hemphill, part of the organization Release The Grip, blames recent teen violence on “the guns they let in” and a lack of stricter consequences.
“We’re not saying we want our kids to go to prison,” Hemphill said. ‘We don’t want them to go to prison, but you have to give them structure. If they go to prison, you have to teach them things.
