A young shooter wounded in a gunfight that killed an innocent Harlem community leader stepping out of her building to check on her grandson has been charged with attempted murder, cops said Thursday.
Darious Smith, 23, is also facing gun possession charges for the Tuesday night shooting outside Tamara’s Beauty Bar, a salon on Lenox Ave. near W. 113th St. Cops say a second gunman Smith was aiming for blasted Smith in the foot and fatally shot 61-year-old bystander Excenia Mette in the head when he fired back at Smith. That second gunman has not been caught.
Surveillance footage recovered by police shows Smith rolling up to the corner on an electric scooter about 10:20 p.m. He begins arguing with a man then whips out a gun, fires two shots at his rival but hits no one.
Smith tries to get back on the scooter but ends up fighting a bystander trying to stop him from fleeing, the video shows.
He fought off the bystander, jumped on his scooter and sped off just as his rival pulled out a gun and fired back, hitting Smith in the foot and striking Mette in the head with a stray bullet, cops said.
Mette, a longtime member of the National Action Network and former owner of Momma Zee’s Food to Plez on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd,, which she said was the first woman and Black-owned bodega in New York City since 1987, was checking on her grandson when she was caught in the crossfire.
“She was intending to see where her grandson was as the rounds started to let go on the street,” NYPD Capt. James Whitlock, commanding officer of the 28th Precinct, said Wednesday at the scene of the shooting. Mette died after being rushed to Mount Sinai Morningside, cops said.
“She was a great lady. She’s been my friend for over 30 years. We moved here about the same time,” Mette’s upstairs neighbor Jerome Davis, 75, said Thursday.
“She used to give me meals,” Davis added. “She fixed meals for just about everybody at some time or another. She was so generous to everybody in the neighborhood.”
Davis was at home in his apartment Tuesday night when the shots rang out.
“I heard the shots,” he said. “In succession, about four shots. And the fact that it was so close is very upsetting.”
Davis was concerned someone he knew might have been struck because of how close the shots sounded but never suspected it was Mette due to her status in the neighborhood.
“I saw the ambulance,” he said. “I even saw them taking her away but I didn’t realize it was her.”
“She felt free to go downstairs at night with no fear at all because everybody knows her,” he added.
Anthony Brown, 59, who works at an outpatient program and pantry down the block from Mette’s apartment, said Mette was a pillar of the neighborhood who offered grandmotherly support to everyone.
“She communicated with the whole neighborhood,” he said. “It’s crazy, it’s hurtful, but it happened. All we could do is pray for her, for her family, give out condolences and just pray, because she was a grand woman.”
Brown, who grew up in the neighborhood, said it has gotten more dangerous since his youth. “When I grew up, the elders, the seniors, the youth, were safe to walk past a crowd,” he said. “When I walk through here I wonder if I’m next … You just pray that it doesn’t happen to you.”
Cops on foot chased down Smith on his scooter, arresting him a block away from the shooting and recovering his firearm. His arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court was pending Thursday.
Six shell casings, two from a .9-mm pistol and four from a .40-caliber handgun, were recovered at the scene along with three bullet fragments, a police source said.
Smith has been arrested 14 times in the past and was about to go to trial on robbery and assault charges for allegedly stabbing two people during an e-bike battery theft last year, officials said.
Originally Published: April 24, 2025 at 9:26 AM EDT
