The father of an innocent Virginia teen struck by stray gunfire on a Bronx playground slammed city leaders Tuesday for not doing enough to stop “stupid violence and crazy crime” in the Big Apple.
“The mayor and police commissioner are not doing enough, they’re leaving it up to the community,” raged Russ Thomas, whose 17-year-old daughter Tamiyah is in intensive care at Harlem Hospital for a graze wound to her head, after the bullet narrowly missed piercing her skull.
“it won’t change until someone important gets killed,” Thomas told The Post of city officials’ attitude.
Thomas said his daughter is lucky to be alive after being shot along with another innocent 17-year-old girl during a cookout at Arcilla Playground on East 163rd Street on Monday night.
Thomas, brother of the famous late Bronx rapper Fred the Godson, said his daughter was visiting family in The Bronx from suburban Virginia and hadn’t been exposed before to the type of violence that’s currently plaguing New York.
“There’s too much stupid violence and crazy crime happening in New York, in broad daylight,” the rattled dad said at the hospital.
He and his wife had flown in to the city from Virginia at 3 a.m. and rushed to their daughter’s bedside, said Thomas, who grew up in the South Bronx.
“Tamiyah lives in a nice neighborhood where you can leave your door open,” Thomas, 41, said. “ When you come into an environment like The Bronx, it’s totally different … Teenagers and young people in their early 20s are shooting at each other here and that’s how innocent people get killed.”
Thomas’ rapper brother, Frederick Thomas, was prominent in New York for more than a decade and collaborated with artists such as Diddy, Meek Mill and Pusha T before he died at age 35 of COVID-19 related illness in April 2020. Leggett Avenue in the Bronx was renamed for the rapper in February 2021.
Tamiyah and the other teen girl were innocent bystanders when a fight between two large groups of men broke out 8 p.m. on the Arcilla basketball court. One of the men pulled a gun and opened fire, sending people running for their lives and scrambling for cover, witnesses and sources said.
The victims told police that the people involved in the fight hadn’t been part of the cookout outside of the court, sources said.
The gates to the court were locked Tuesday afternoon, and abandoned shoes, basketballs and coolers were still left on the court from the panic the night before.
Thomas said he had just spoken to his daughter an hour before the shooting and that she was happy, playing basketball with her cousins. His twin 15-year-old daughters FaceTimed him from the scene of the shooting in a panic in the aftermath, he said.
“What do you do as a parent when your twin daughters FaceTime you screaming because there is blood coming down your eldest daughter’s head?” he said. “It was a very dramatic situation.”
He described his daughter as “smart, very talented, bright” and said she’s planning to study nursing at Norfolk State University in Virginia this fall.
“She was excited about life. She wanted to spend time in New York before she went to school,” Thomas said.
The other victim, who was hit in the leg, had apparently been released. Thomas said he didn’t know her and didn’t believe his daughter knew her, either.
No arrests have been made in the shooting.
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