The accused gunman in the botched Brooklyn daylight gang hit that killed 7-month-old Kaori Patterson-Moore with a stray bullet told cops he was seeking revenge for a prior shooting when he opened fire, police sources said Wednesday.
When he confessed to police, Amuri Greene, 21, said the April 1 shooting near Moore and Humboldt Sts. in East Williamsburg was payback for a shooting involving a friend. He didn’t elaborate on when or where that shooting took place, the sources said.
The NYPD is preparing to extradite from Pennsylvania Matthew Rodriguez, Greene’s accused accomplice, who was allegedly operating the scooter the gunman was riding on the back of when shots rang out.
The NYPD released surveillance footage of the gunman and his accomplice in the stray bullet shooting of a 7-month-old girl in a stroller near Humboldt and Moore Sts. in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on April 1st. (NYPD)
Rodriguez, 18, was caught in Monroe County, Pa., on Friday and waived his extradition during a brief court appearance there Monday. He’s expected to be returned to New York in the coming days.
Greene and Rodriguez have been indicted on a raft of criminal charges including murder, attempted murder, and assault.
During their harried getaway, Rodriguez crashed the scooter a few blocks away. Greene suffered a broken leg in the crash and was quickly arrested.
A candle memorial for Kaori Patterson-Moore outside an apartment building on Moore St. in Brooklyn. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News)
Though Greene told police he was gunning for the girl’s dad, according to prosecutors at his initial arraignment last week — something Kaori’s mother vehemently denies — Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez partially walked that back Tuesday when announcing grand jury indictments against the two suspects.
“I am not prepared to say today definitively that the father was the target. We know that he was intending to shoot a person in that crowd, and the baby’s father was among those people in that crowd,” Gonzalez told reporters. “But I don’t think it’s completely 100 percent clear to me that this was in fact the person they were shooting that and that they knew who he was.”