NEW YORK — Four people were shot at a raucous barbecue in a Bronx park, leaving one victim dead and the others — including an 11-year-old boy — wounded, police said Sunday.
Shots rang out in Claremont Park near Teller Avenue and Mount Eden Parkway just before 11:15 p.m. Saturday after an argument broke out at the cookout celebrating Central American Independence Day, cops and witnesses said.
Neighborhood resident Diana Martinez, 29, said she had only been at the cookout for about an hour before a fight between two women broke out.
“I heard like five or six shots and everybody was running,” Martinez said. “They were screaming and falling over each other, running, scared. They were scared. There were a lot of people.”
At least one of three men police are looking for pulled out a gun and began to fire off shots into the crowd. The men fired off indiscriminate rounds into the sea of partygoers and took off, police said.
EMS rushed three of the victims to local hospitals. Later, a 22-year-old man walked into Lincoln Hospital with a gunshot wound to the leg.
A 22-year-old man EMS took to Bronx Care Health System died from a gunshot wound to the torso. His name was not immediately released.
An 11-year-old boy shot in the shoulder was in stable condition at Lincoln Hospital. A 24-year-old woman blasted twice in the torso and was in critical condition at the same hospital.
Police recovered one gun at the scene, sources said.
On Sunday afternoon Martinez was sifting through debris left behind by terrified partygoers, looking for a friend’s phone lost in the chaos. She moved to the neighborhood two months ago and had never been to Claremont Park before Saturday night.
“It was really scary,” she said of the shooting. “People, they just come to have fun. Then they get shot.”
At a news conference in Claremont Park Sunday, Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa slammed the de Blasio administration and the city Parks Department for a lack of lighting and NYPD surveillance cameras in city parks.
“You can tell what a dire circumstance it must have been as people fled for their lives, fled for their lives as they left everything else behind,” Sliwa said.
Police are still looking for the men behind the deadly shooting. They fled in a white Nissan, authorities said.
