A teenage fugitive was caught Thursday days after a broad-daylight shooting that killed an innocent, walker-using 69-year-old grandmother, law enforcement sources said.
The 18-year-old suspect was picked up by the feds and the NYPD in connection to the 12:25 p.m. Aug. 27 shooting of Robin Wright – who was struck in the face and killed by a straw bullet at East 110th Street and Madison Avenue, the sources said.
The teen was nabbed when Homeland Security Investigations, the NYPD’s Violent Gang Task Force and the US Marshals Regional Fugitive Task Force closed in on him in connection to the senseless violence – which sources said stemmed from a botched weed robbery.
“I just stood right there and watched my friend while she died,” Juanita Arnold, a friend who was with Wright when she was fatally struck, previously told The Post at the scene. “Because she wanted lunch and couldn’t make it back?
“This was not necessary. That lady should’ve never died like that.”
Wright often took walks as exercise to help with her recovery after a recent surgery on the veins in her legs, according to her friends and neighbors.
“She was looking for [her] grandson to walk with her, to go get lunch,” Arnold said. “She wanted some exercise. She was rehabilitating herself and getting strength back in her legs so I asked what she wanted to do.
“I will walk with you to go get your lunch. And that’s what we did. She never made it back but I did.”
Wright’s neighbor, Sonya Hampton, said she was with the ailing victim on the ground as she took her last breath.
“I was just coming from the store and I heard the gunshots,” Hampton said. “I turned around to see where the bullets landed and she was on the floor.”
The gunfire erupted a short time after the teen shooter and another still-at-large menace tried to rob a man a block away from the scene, law enforcement sources said.
The duo ran off, but the victim chased and fired after them, according to the sources.
When the pair returned fire at their armed victim, they inadvertently struck Wright, the sources said.
The gravely wounded Wright was rushed to Mount Sinai Morningside by EMS, but she could not be saved, cops said.
The teen gunman’s arrest came a day after five young suspects – all but one of them teens – were charged with murder in a Labor Day drive-by shooting that killed a man and injured four others outside a known weed spot in the Bronx, cops and sources said.
“We’re seeing shooters becoming younger and younger,” Mayor Eric Adams said on FOX 5’s Good Day New York Wednesday morning. “We’re seeing the direct results of some of the laws that we have passed – some of the actions, both in Albany and in the City Council.”
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