Justin Wallace was killed and his 29-year-old uncle was wounded by a gunman who opened fire at a house in the Rockaways, the police said.
A 10-year-old boy was killed and his uncle was wounded over the weekend in a shooting in Queens that the police believe might have stemmed from a parking dispute between neighbors, officials said on Sunday.
The boy, Justin Wallace, and his uncle were inside a house on Beach 45th Street in the Edgemere neighborhood of the Rockaways on Saturday when they were shot around 9:30 p.m., the police said.
The home’s security cameras recorded the gunman as he walked up to the house and fired at least eight shots through the railing on the steps leading to the doorway before running off.
Justin, who was about to turn 11 on Tuesday, was struck in the stomach and pronounced dead at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital. His uncle, Kyle Forrester, 29, was shot in the shoulder but expected to survive.
Investigators were looking into the possibility that the shooting was connected to a parking dispute earlier in the day between someone in the family and a neighbor. The police said the gunman arrived in a dark blue sport-utility vehicle seen on the video driving past the home just before the shooting.
Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday condemned the shooting and described it as “a coward’s act.”
“He had his entire life ahead of him,” Mr. de Blasio said on Twitter. “It’s a profound injustice. His killer will be brought to justice.”
The boy was one of nine people shot on Saturday in six separate incidents, according to the police. Another child, a 12-year-old girl, and a man were shot earlier Saturday in an unrelated incident in the Bronx.
The girl, who was visiting from New Jersey, was hit in the ankle, and the man, 25, was shot in the chest shortly before 6 p.m. outside a building on Wythe Place near the intersection with East 171st Street. Both victims were treated at BronxCare Health System and expected to survive, the police said.
The shootings came amid a spike in gun violence in New York and other major cities. Through Saturday, 678 people in the city had been killed or injured in 594 shootings. Both figures increased about 69 percent from the same period in 2020, when 402 people were hurt in 352 shootings.
The continued rise in shootings has fueled growing fears of crime and made public safety a dominant issue in the mayor’s race. Several candidates issued statements on the violence on Sunday.
“Our babies are dying in our streets,” Eric Adams, a former police captain who has made public safety the centerpiece of his campaign, said on Twitter. Andrew Yang, the former tech entrepreneur and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, called Justin’s death “awful and unthinkable.”
And Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, said the gun violence showed “something broken” in a political system where public-safety decisions are driven by ideology instead of data.
At the white two-family house where Justin lived on Beach 69th Street, relatives held vigil on the front porch, while inside, a minister consoled the grieving parents.
They said Justin was looking forward to his birthday and had sent invitations to his friends and classmates for a barbecue that was to be one of the family’s first gatherings at the house since the pandemic.
Mesha, 36, a family friend who would only give her first name, described Justin as “rambunctious” and “fun.”
On a day like Sunday, he would be playing with the family’s dog, Hazel. “He’d be rubbing all over her, chasing her around,” Mesha said as the dog rested in the yard alone.
Or he might be riding his bike, a skill he had just learned. Occasionally, he tossed around a football with a friend who sometimes visited his grandmother on the block.
Dawn Thaxter, 59, who lives across the street, praised Justin’s good manners. “Whenever he sees you, he would always say hi,” she said.
Ramos Gaston, 49, lives in the apartment above Justin’s family. His 12-year-old stepson, who moved in with him last year, had become fast friends with Justin over games of Minecraft, Mr. Gaston said.
When it came to the boy’s killing, he was as lost for words as those who had come to pay their respects.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.
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