Brooklyn teen shot to death in SoHo remembered as basketball lover, devoted student

A teenage boy gunned down in SoHo on Tuesday afternoon near his high school loved basketball and commuted roughly two hours each day to and from his home in East Flatbush so he could advance his education, his close friends and family said.

Mahki Brown, 16, was fatally shot in the head and thigh around 2:30 p.m. at an outdoor plaza on Spring Street near Varick Street, according to police. He was just a couple of blocks from Broome Street Academy Charter High School, where he attended.

“He needed change, he couldn’t be here in this area, because it was this area with friends that strayed him,” said Lakesha Jenkins, a longtime friend of Brown’s family. “But once his mother switched his school, the change came. You seen the growth, you seen the ‘I want better.’”

Police said the shooting stemmed from a fight among teenagers around school dismissal time, and were looking for two suspects who fled the scene. One was riding a Citi Bike around the time of the incident, NYPD officials said. It was not immediately clear if the suspects were also students at a nearby school.

On Wednesday morning, Jenkins and other devastated neighbors crowded into Brown’s mother’s apartment on East 93rd Street in East Flatbush to console her over the loss of her only child. His mother declined to speak to reporters but nodded along as others remembered Brown.

“I helped raise him,” neighbor Ramel Williams said through tears while hugging Brown’s mother.

“This is one that hit us hard as a unit,” Jenkins said.

Brown was a basketball lover who participated in tournaments every summer and was very close with his mother, according to their neighbors. Jenkins lamented the particular gravity of the loss less than a week before Mother’s Day.

“I’m not going to see Mahki outside trying to get his change together for a card,” she said, adding that Brown had given his mother a bag filled with gifts on Valentine’s Day. “He wasn’t a bad kid. Well-respectful kid, I could see him and tell him, ‘come here,’ and he would stop and he would listen.”

Friends set up a candlelight memorial in an alleyway near the family’s building and scrawled “Forever Kai” and “Long Live 16” on the brick wall. Later on Wednesday, a young woman who identified herself as Brown’s girlfriend paced around the memorial, sobbing. She said she was with him when he died. “I just keep seeing him on the floor," she said.

Fatal shootings are rare in the First Police Precinct, which includes SoHo, Tribeca and Wall Street. There had been no shootings at all in the precinct by this point in 2023, according to data from the NYPD.

Jenkins and the other neighbors said elected officials and community residents have to work together to protect young people from gun violence, wherever they go.

“We need the mayor, we need the [schools] chancellor, we need the governor, we need everybody to focus on making these streets more safer for our children,” she said. “But we as parents, we as people, we have to get out there and help too. No one man can do it, it takes an army of us to get it done.”