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Police bust Riis Houses teen in murder of Mahki Brown

BY THE VILLAGE SUN | Police arrested an East Village teenager today in the May 7 fatal shooting of Mahki Brown, 16, near the Broome Street Academy charter school on Soho’s western edge.

Henry Thomas, 19, of 152 Avenue D, between 10th and 11th Streets, in the Jacob Riis Houses, was charged with murder. The New York Post reported that the U.S. Marshals Service arrested him in Harlem earlier today.

According to police, two girls at the school got into a beef on May 6 and then fought after school. The next day the pair tried to fight each other again. Things escalated to the point where some males got involved in the heated dispute, as well.

Police cordoned off the crime scene for the investigation after Mahki Brown’s shooting on May 7. (Photo by Tequila Minsky)

Brown, who enjoyed playing basketball, was from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He was trying to act as a “peacemaker” and break up the fight when one of the women called her brother for backup, Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said during a press conference. Two youths then pulled up on a Citi Bike and one of them fired gunshots into a crowd of students, with Brown being struck in the head and thigh.

He collapsed in a through-block walkway just east of the Dominick Hotel, the former Trump Soho Hotel, a block and a half away from the school. Brown was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

A police spokesperson said the fight that wound up taking a young man’s life was basically a typical high school dispute over something trivial, as he put it, “just dumb stuff.”

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