‘She just started saying, ‘Mama’: Brooklyn mother steps onto NYC streets with 7-month-old baby in a stroller, only to lose her forever

A gang shooting in New York City took the life of a 7-month-old infant and slightly injured her 2-year-old brother. The New York Police Department is now looking into what led up to the Brooklyn shooting and has arrested one of two persons of interest in the tragedy.

For the family, however, their palpable grief has taken priority over the search for justice. The New York Post was able to secure timely interviews with members of the family, and they are still in a momentary state of disbelief. It’s truly a situation where words can barely convey what they must be feeling at a time like this.

Lianna Charles-Moore, the mother, recounted the sequence of events from her perspective. She was walking her two children in a double stroller along Humboldt and Moore Streets in East Williamsburg when she heard a blast. At first, Charles-Moore assumed it was fireworks, but then her son jumped out of the stroller.

When she picked him up, she turned to check on her daughter and realized she had been shot in the head and was bleeding out. Her son had also been grazed on his back by a bullet and, according to Charles-Moore, has been asking for his sister ever since. She told the publication, “My daughter was innocent. She didn’t deserve that. We were just going outside to go get her a few things, and my son a few things. My son got impacted with everything that happened, yeah, so it was just too much, because they could have killed my son and my daughter.”

Gun violence has been that one problem that simply won’t go away. There have been parents who have killed their children, neighbors who have mistakenly shot each other — all kinds of situations that point to the same uncomfortable conclusion: whatever is in place right now isn’t working.

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch held a press conference, informing the public that the shooting took place at 1:20 p.m. Surveillance footage has since been released, showing the shooter firing the weapon from behind. The gunmen were traveling on a moped and fled the scene before getting into an accident two blocks away.

It’s still unclear who the shooters were targeting, but considering the controversy surrounding New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision to appoint Tisch, there will be added pressure to secure a conviction. Politically, she may be unaligned with the mayor, but situations like this tend to override those differences. A manhunt is underway for the second suspect.

Charles-Moore revealed that her infant had just started walking and had begun calling her “mama.” Her mother, Linda Moore Oyinkoinyan, was equally devastated. She said, “My daughter called me at my job. She was screaming. I had to hang up on her. She was scaring me. She said, ‘They shot Kaori in the head.’ She was screaming. She was frantic. I just passed out in the class.”

Oyinkoinyan gave a small tribute for Kaori saying, “She was loving. She was caring. Always smiling. She was very smart. The baby was very beautiful. She brought a lot of people together.”