The Hunt for the Three Who Chased Down Javits Frimpong: Police Trace an Escape Through the Subway and Subpoena the School Records
Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said Monday that detectives are working three possible motives in the killing of the 15-year-old on his walk to school — bullying, robbery, or a mistaken identity — and that the NYPD had to subpoena the Department of Education for information. No arrests have been made.
Five days after a 15-year-old was chased down and shot on his walk to school in the Bronx, the NYPD's chief of detectives went public Monday with how much the department knows — and how much it still does not. Javits Frimpong was walking to DreamYard Preparatory School shortly before 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 29, when three masked suspects approached him near East 171st Street and Crotona Place in Claremont, Chief Joseph Kenny said. Frimpong recognized the danger and ran. He was shot in the abdomen, and officers rushed him to St. Barnabas Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The details Kenny released Monday are the movements after the shot. The suspects went back to pick up a shell casing, he said, before escaping into a subway station on Southern Boulevard, where they jumped the turnstiles and boarded a train toward Manhattan — a route investigators have traced on surveillance cameras. Frimpong had dropped his backpack as he fled; police say a bystander stole it, and it has never been recovered.
Kenny said detectives are working three possible motives, and he was careful to call them possibilities: a robbery; the bullying Frimpong's father, Thomas Frimpong, has said his son suffered at school, which the father believes is behind the killing; or a case of mistaken identity, in which the shooters took the boy for a rival. "We're looking at the possibility this is a robbery," Kenny said. "We're not going to discount the bullying angle here." Kenny said police have found nothing indicating Frimpong was involved in gang activity. And he disclosed a step that shows where the bullying inquiry has run into a wall: the NYPD subpoenaed the city's Department of Education for information in the case. The school system has said counseling and support are being made available to students, families and staff, and that it is assisting the investigation.
Frimpong had been in the United States about a year, having come from Ghana to join his father. On Monday, Ghana's deputy foreign minister met the boy's mother in Accra to offer the government's condolences, and the country's mission in the United States is working with authorities here on the case. In the Bronx, a memorial of candles and flowers marks the stretch of East 171st Street where he fell. No arrests have been made. Anyone with information is asked to call NYPD Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS.
