A 15-year-old boy was fatally shot in the head and a 13-year-old boy grazed by the same bullet fired by a teen who ran off and is being sought, police sources said Thursday.
Riley Billingslea was shot in the neck near his ear in the Castle Arms apartment building on Claflin Ave. near W. 197th St. in Kingsbridge about 5:20 p.m. Wednesday, cops said.
“He was a good person — and he didn’t have to go down like this,” Riley’s anguished grandmother Elaine Rogers, whom he was living with, told the Daily News in an exclusive interview. “He was witty, had an answer for everything.”
The bullet exited Riley’s head, ricocheted and grazed a 13-year-old friend in the torso, police sources said.
Riley got into a quarrel with the 16-year-old shooter, who opened his backpack, pulled out a gun, put a magazine on it and fired, the sources said.
“I’m gonna throw some pain,” the shooter threatened before opening fire, the sources said.
Riley died at the scene. He lived with his grandmother in an apartment just under a mile away from the Castle Arms.
“Kids came to my door and they told me he was shot,” Riley’s grandmother said. “And then I called the cops. I was asking, ‘Was there a report?’ And you know, they were saying they hadn’t had a report, that I was actually the first call that they got.’
The grazed teen fled the apartment to his home about a mile away. Medics took him to St. Barnabas Hospital in stable condition, police said.
The shooter ran off and has not been caught. No gun was not recovered from the scene, police sources said.
Other people fled the apartment as well. A man in his 20s man and his aunt were still in the apartment when cops arrived, the sources said.
“My understanding, he was supposed to have been with friends,” Riley’s grandmother said. “I guess when everything happened, they panicked and everybody ran.”
“I’ve met now with six, seven of his friends,” she added. “From what they’re telling us, everybody, you know, loved him over there … There was no beef or anything like that.”
Riley left his grandmother’s apartment around noon Wednesday, about five hours before he was shot.
“There was supposed to have been a grandmother that lived there,” Rogers said of the apartment where her grandson was shot. “Where is she? Have they spoken to her? I have no clue of that. I would like to know that myself: Where was the grandmother?”
Riley spent about six months at the Missouri Military Academy to learn “structure,” his grandmother said, before coming to live with her in January.
“He had fallen off — and I’m gonna say that might have been due to friends, bad choices — but he was trying to get it together,” she said. “He was always talking about, he wanted to do something in engineering, computers … He liked PlayStation and just these lights that he hung in the room … LED lights that he had all over the room, that was his thing.”
She hopes the shooter turns himself in.
“I would just want him to come forward and tell his story,” she said. “By running, it looks like you’re guilty of something.”
“I don’t know him,” she added. “This is a friend or a person that I wouldn’t have any knowledge of. I’m not far from where it happened, but I don’t know these kids.”
It was the second time in just two days a Bronx teen was fatally shot in the head.
About 5:10 a.m. Monday, 16-year-old John Nunez was fatally shot in the head in his best friend’s family’s house on Prospect Ave. near E.169th St. — apparently as he and the friend were playing around with a gun, police said. He died at the scene.
Nobody has been charged in John’s death.
“We’re hurt. We’re devastated. Our hearts are shattered,” John’s oldest sister, Sol Nunez, said at John’s family’s home a few blocks from where he was killed Monday evening. “It’s unbelievable.”
