New York City started 2025 with back-to-back killings within six hours of the ball dropping in Times Square.
As police cleared out Times Square so the city Department of Sanitation could sweep up all the New Year’s confetti, cops were called to W. 137th St. and Lenox Ave. in Harlem, where they found a man sprawled out on the ground with a slash wound to his neck at about 4:20 a.m. Wednesday.
Medics rushed the victim to Harlem Hospital, but he couldn’t be saved. Cops were still working to identify the man.
A person of interest was taken into custody by cops but not immediately charged.
An hour later two men were shot, one fatally, in the Bronx, police said.
Gunshots rang out on E. 170th St. near Teller Ave., just across the street from Claremont Park, at about 5:20 a.m.
First responders found 46-year-old Mario Fowler, who had been shot in both legs, inside his apartment building down the block from the shooting scene. Medics rushed him to St. Barnabas Hospital, where he died.
One witness, who wanted to be unnamed, said he saw Fowler near the buildings steps laid out and bleeding while two police officers tried to render aid.
“They said he was not unresponsive, that’s when I knew he was gone,” the witness said. “Everybody in the building knew him, he was a really good guy.”
A trail of blood was seen near the steps of the building.
A next door neighbor to Fowler, Cielo Ortiz, 72, remembered him as a “respectful person.”
“He was a good family man, he had four kids, three of them grown,” Ortiz said.
Meanwhile, cops found a 23-year-old man with a graze wound to the chin in front of an apartment building about a block away on Clay Ave. Medics took him to Lincoln Hospital in stable condition.
No arrests have been made in the second case.
Within the same hour in the Bronx, police responded to a fatal stabbing on Westchester Ave. and Manor Ave. in Soundview around 5 a.m., where a 32-year-old man was stabbed in the back of the neck and suffered trauma to his body.
EMS transported the victim to Jacobi Medical Center where he was initially listed in stable condition but would later succumb to his injuries. His name was not immediately released.
There were no arrests in the case.
Earlier in the evening, in the last few hours of 2024, two men were shot and two others pistol-whipped during a crazed clash in Canarsie, Brooklyn, cops said.
A 23-year-old man was shot in the head and right foot and a 62-year-old man suffered a gunshot wound to the gut during the 7:15 p.m. shooting on E. 105th St. near Flatlands Second St., cops said. The gunman also struck two other men, 20 and 25, with his handgun before running off.
All four men were taken to Brookdale University Hospital, where they were expected to recover. No arrests have been made.
The NYPD ended 2024 with a 3% drop in homicides and a 7% drop in shootings citywide compared with the previous year.
As of Sunday, NYPD detectives had investigated 375 homicides in 2024, 15 fewer than the year before. Cops responded to 899 shootings compared with 974 in 2023.
