MT. EDEN, The Bronx (PIX11) — The family of Jacob Freytes spent Monday outside, in the courtyard in front of the building where the 12-year-old innocent bystander who was gunned down at close range lived.
There, in the space separating the two different wings of their building, they wept, embraced, reminisced, and grieved together next to a memorial they’d set up in the boy’s memory.
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That memorial, a large, white box, kept getting more and more candles, flowers, stuffed animals, balloons and any number of other gifts added to it throughout the day as the group of mourners made up of his family, their friends and neighbors came and went all day long.
The morning began with Freytes’s mother, Migdalia Martinez, sitting on the front steps of the U-shaped courtyard, weeping, as different relatives and friends stopped by to console her.
She politely accepted the condolences of PIX11 News but also declined to comment, at least “not right now,” she said.
Surveillance video from a bodega at the intersection of Walton Avenue and Elliot Place, which is literally around the corner from Jacob’s apartment building, captured what happened shortly before 5:00 p.m. on Saturday.
The video from the Wanda Deli bodega showed the 12-year-old enter and purchase a ball to play with. The video then shows the boy get on his bike, and as he mounts it, a fight breaks out among a group of five men a few feet away from him. At least one of the men pulls out a handgun and opens fire.
Jacob, who is seen in the video just a few feet away from the gunman, gets hit. The boy takes a few steps into the bodega, holding the right side of his upper chest, near his shoulder. Seconds later, the boy falls to the floor in the bodega.
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Police and EMS crews responded, but by the time they were able to rush Jacob to Lincoln Hospital, his condition had deteriorated. Doctors declared the boy dead upon arrival at the hospital.
Jacob’s father, Jesus Freytes, is a retired NYPD detective sergeant, as his union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, confirmed.
The whole situation has outraged people who knew the boy, as well as the whole community.
“He was just a child,” said one local resident, “and he was just riding his bike. Why? Why?” she asked.
Another neighbor, Elian Fournier, had placed a candle at the other memorial that residents had set up in Jacob’s memory, outside of the bodega.
Fournier said that the situation had escalated in a way that was unnecessary.
“It was a fight that led to a gunfight, that led to a shooting death,” he said, adding that the gunfight also injured two of the men who’d allegedly been involved in it. Police said that those men are expected to be okay, health-wise. Fournier continued, “At some point, we’ve got to say, ‘Enough is enough.”
Fournier’s description of what had happened was based on the account that investigators had given.
They said that William Ferrer, a 45-year-old local resident, had fired the shot that killed Jacob Freytes. They also said that the fight was gang-related.
At an unrelated event on Monday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked about the killing. It was also pointed out that the mayor had declared earlier this year that he’d create a new NYPD command in the Bronx to complement the one there already. That expansion was intended to add some 580 additional officers to the force. However, four weeks ago, the mayor rescinded the plan.
In the aftermath of Jacob Freytes’s killing, the mayor’s change of policy is getting additional scrutiny.
He said that his office has made overtures to the family, and pledged to do all he can to seek justice and fight crimes like this.
“We can never accept that a 12-year-old boy can be killed while on his bicycle in this city,” the mayor said.
Despite his pledge to pursue all efforts possible in this case, Mayor Mamdani also said, “We can never say that enough has been done when we are seeing children being killed in our streets.”
Ferrer, the suspect, was charged with murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, assault, and criminal possession of a weapon.
A judge ordered him held without bail. His case goes before a grand jury this Friday, July 31.
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