A 20-year-old woman pushing a pram on a New York street was shot in the head from behind and killed on Wednesday, police have said.
The victim was attacked on East 95th Street near Lexington Avenue around 8.30pm with a gunman shooting her in the head from close range with a single bullet.
She was taken to Metropolitan Hospital Center, where she died of her wounds. The three-month-old child was unharmed, police said.
At a press conference near the scene in the Upper East side of Manhattan, New York's mayor, Eric Adams, appealed for help in finding the shooter.
"We are going to find the person who is guilty of this horrific crime. We are going to find him and bring him to justice," Mayor Adams said.
He said it was another example of the problem that the US has with gun crime.
"When a mother's pushing a baby carriage down the block, or an individual or a woman is pushing a baby carriage down the block, and is shot in point blank range, it shows just how this national problem is impacting families," he said.
"It doesn't matter if you are on the Upper East Side or East New York, Brooklyn."
The NYPD said on Twitter that residents should avoid the area due to an investigation.
The woman was shot once in the head by a gunman, dressed all in black, who approached her from behind.
No suspects had been taken into custody as of Wednesday night and detectives are currently looking at CCTV footage in the area.
The shooting marks the latest in a string of attacks, some of them seemingly random, on the streets and subways of New York that have left residents on edge.
It comes as New York lawmakers will meet in an emergency session on Thursday to loosen the state's gun-licensing laws to conform with a landmark US Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right for people to carry weapons in public for self-defence.
Last week's Supreme Court decision was in a case challenging New York's century-old gun license laws. The six justices in the court's conservative majority ruled that it was unconstitutional to require law-abiding people to provide "proper cause," or some kind of special need, for concealed-carry handgun licenses for self-defence.
Soon after, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, ordered the extraordinary session of the legislature in Albany, the state capital, to revise the state's gun laws in keeping with the ruling, which she warned would lead to more gun violence.
