It was a violent night in the Bronx on Thursday, where two men were fatally shot in separate incidents just about an hour apart.<\/p>\n
The first happened around 9:30 p.m. at a deli in the Williamsbridge section.<\/p>\n
Police say a dispute began inside the Bronxwood Avenue bodega and spilled outside. The victim, 22-year-old Ricardo Bygrave, was shot in the head and pronounced dead<\/a> at Jacobi Hospital.<\/p>\n Police were back on Bronxwood Avenue Friday morning looking for additional surveillance video as they investigate this killing.<\/p>\n The homicide took place just hours after the NYPD released its quarterly crime statistics, which reflected a positive trend for the borough.<\/p>\n “The Bronx leads the city in overall major crime declines with a 9.4 percent decrease,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said.<\/p>\n Brooklyn saw a dramatic 44% drop, while Manhattan and Queens experienced a 6 percent decrease. There were no murders on Staten Island.<\/p>\n But the most serious of the major crimes, murder, remains stubbornly steady in the Bronx, 21 this year compared to 19 through the same period last year. The statistics show that 40% of the city’s murders so far this year have taken place in the Bronx.<\/p>\n “Over the years and decades of looking at police statistics, it’s not too outlandish that the Bronx is kind of an outlier in New York City,” said Brian Higgins of John Jay College of Criminal Justice.<\/p>\n Just one hour after the Williamsbridge shooting, another unrelated instance of gun violence occurred. A dispute between neighbors escalated with 21-year-old Justin Chatfield being shot in the torso at 30 Richman Plaza in Morris Heights. He was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital and pronounced dead.<\/p>\n The victim’s neighbor, 76-year-old Gilbert Smalls, was charged with murder, manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon. Police say Smalls was arrested after knocking on his door and asking for video from his doorbell camera to aid their investigation. Instead, Smalls told them, “I’m the one who shot him.”<\/p>\n The dispute was initially between Smalls and another neighbor. Chatfield stepped in to help, but it cost him his life.<\/p>\n On Thursday, the police commissioner touted the strategies the NYPD has been employing to drive numbers down.<\/p>\n “We identified the communities historically plagued by violent crime and deployed an unprecedented number of cops to our violence reduction zones,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said. “These are the places that have been hardest hit, and now we are seeing tremendous progress.”<\/p>\n Earlier this year, Commissioner Tisch announced plans to divide the Bronx into two distinct patrol areas, in line with Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, which are split into north and south borough commands.<\/p>\n Higgins says the move makes sense.<\/p>\n “The bigger the area that you handle as a as a supervisor, as administrator and department, the more resources, it can be a little daunting,” he said. “So, when you break it up like this, the command personnel now have a smaller area to focus their resources.”<\/p>\n ———- Submit a tip or story idea to Eyewitness News<\/p>\n
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