Police want to speak with the father of the baby who shot and killed a woman in New York City while she was pushing her child in a stroller. She was a victim of domestic abuse at the hands of the baby’s father, and police are interested in speaking with him.
The woman shot dead on a sidewalk on Wednesday night at 8:23 p.m. at the intersection of Lexington Avenue and 95th Street in the affluent Upper East Side neighborhood, across the street from a playground full of kids, was identified by her mother as Azsia Johnson, 20.
According to Lisa Desort’s account to The New Post, the baby’s father assaulted her daughter while she was six months pregnant. After the incident, he “stalked” and “harassed” Johnson, which prompted them to call the police, according to Desort. She added that he wasn’t detained, though. According to police sources, the baby’s father is currently wanted for questioning.
‘The city was supposed to be protecting her,’ Lisa Desort told Fox News as she broke down in tears. ‘This is a domestic violence case from January. We called the precinct.’
A person of interest was identified and the NYPD is probing a domestic violence link in the fatal shooting, according to City Council member Julie Menin, who represents the area, said on Twitter.
The baby’s father has not been named a suspect in the women’s killing. Police are trying to locate him for questioning, police sources told New York Daily News.
Desort sobbed as she told Fox News that they had called police numerous times for protection.
‘All that anyone needs to know in this city is we called numerous times for her protection,’ Desort said. ‘No one protected my daughter, and now she’s dead.’
The 20-year-old victim was walking with her three-month-old baby when the hooded shooter approached her and ‘fired a single shot into her head from a very close range,’ NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell told reporters at a press conference held Wednesday night.
The victim’s mother says the suspected shooter, who immediately fled on foot following the shooting and remains at large, is the father of the child the victim was pushing in the stroller when she was shot.
Police sources told the New York Daily News that the young mother had texted relatives saying she was planning to meet up with her child’s father the night she was killed, so they could talk things out. She had reportedly been assaulted by him while pregnant and wasn’t sure if she wanted him in her life.
‘It appears she was targeted, not a stray bullet,’ a police source said of the shooting. ‘Close contact wound to the head. She had powder burns on her head, to show you how close he was.’
It’s not clear if recent alleged assaults were reported to the police, but the victim’s mother claims they called for help ‘numerous’ times.
‘He threatened me with death, my daughter with death, and my other daughter with death,’ Desort said. ‘We called the precinct numerous times.’
Desort said her daughter, who aspired to be a pediatric nurse, had everything going for her.
‘She had been working since she was 16, and she took care of people. She was the best mother,’ she said through tears. ‘My daughter did not deserve this.’
A Texas man who recently moved to New York with his family said he had heard about the escalating crime in the city, but never thought it would happen so close to home – until he discovered his SUV riddled with bullets and being towed from the scene of the Upper East Side shooting.
Julio Cruz, 62, father of two, told DailyMail.com he had left his car in the area because there was no parking where he lives. But when he went to move his car, he found it was part of a murder investigation.
‘I came today to move the car and [to my surprise] they were moving my car,’ he said. ‘The officer told me the bullet is into the car and they took it to inspection it. And I need to pick up my car, I don’t know.’
Cruz, who moved from Texas to the city with his family for work two weeks ago, said they had heard of this kind of news happening in New York.
‘Look, in Texas, as well as everywhere else, you hear about these kind of news that happen in New York,’ he said. ‘Me and my family came for work. But you never think it’s going to happen so close to you. We heard before moving here, about crimes in the subway and everywhere in the city, but you just don’t think it will happen to you.’
The Manhattan neighborhood is the most affluent in New York, with average house prices at an eye-watering $1.5million and private school fees exceeding $58,000 per year.
Horrified children at the nearby playground witnessed the horrific shooting, and one girl described hearing a loud ‘boom’ that she quickly realized was a gunshot.
Mayor Eric Adams blamed the shooting on the ‘over-proliferation of guns’ and said that criminals have ‘no fear in using these guns on innocent New Yorkers.’
The shooting comes four days after President Joe Biden signed into law a legislation that marks some of the biggest changes to federal gun law in decades.
‘Lives will be saved,’ Biden said during the signing ceremony in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.
‘From Columbine to Sandy Hook to Charleston, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland, El Paso, Atlanta, Buffalo, Uvalde, and for the shootings that happen every day in the streets that are mass shootings, we don’t even hear about the number of people killed every day in the streets. Their message to us was to just something,’ the president said.
‘Today we did,’ he noted.
The new law comes in the wake of a spat of mass shootings including one at a grocery store in Buffalo where 10 black people were killed and one at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where 17 children and two teachers died.
Biden conceded the legislation doesn’t have everything he wanted but ‘it does include actions I’ve long called for that are going to save lives.’
The president praised the bipartisan work on the issue.
‘It’s time when this seems impossible get anything done in Washington. We are doing something consequential,’ he said.
The day of the shooting, New York City and state officials announced lawsuits against 10 sellers of gun parts that the officials said can be assembled into untraceable ghost guns and sold without background checks.
State Attorney General Letitia James and New York City Mayor Eric Adams said the weapons sold by online ghost gun retailers have been found at a growing share of New York’s crime scenes.
‘These are dangerous weapons,’ Adams, a former police officer, said at a Manhattan news conference with James and other officials. ‘We should not think these are just kits used for hobbyists. They are being used by murderers. All of them are illegal.’
The shooter was described as a man dressed in black pants and a hooded sweatshirt. The killer’s identity was not further described by the police.
The woman was taken by ambulance to the Metropolitan Hospital, but she passed away there within an hour. The infant was not hurt and was also taken to the hospital for evaluation.
The 19th police precinct of New York City, where the shooting took place, is typically one of the safest parts of the city. Just two murders were reported in the precinct in 2018; as of Wednesday, no murders had been reported in 2022.
The precinct, which includes the mayor’s residence, Gracie Mansion, is one of Manhattan’s most densely populated residential areas.
It also includes a section of Madison Avenue that features some of the city’s most upscale retail establishments.
The 19th Precinct, like the rest of the city, is experiencing an increase in crime, according to data from the NYPD.
Robbery is up 60% this year so far compared to the same time last year, and felony assault is up 23%. Major crimes are up 44% this year so far in the precinct.
The precinct has so far in 2022 recorded 1,162 major crimes, as opposed to 805 incidents during the same period in 2021.
Robbery, burglary, and felony assault are the three crimes that have increased the most in New York City overall this year compared to last year, totaling a 38 percent increase.
However, homicides are down 13% from last year, and shooting victims are down 9%; Adams and law enforcement officials attribute these improvements to efforts to remove illegal firearms from the streets.
The NYPD detectives are asking anyone with information about the shooting to call them at 1-800-577-TIPS.