A rookie police officer shot and killed a 14-year-old boy in the Bronx early Sunday morning after the officer and his partner told the teenager to drop his gun and he did not, the Police Department said.
The police said the two officers, both recent Police Academy graduates, were patrolling near East 151st Street and Courtlandt Avenue when they heard shots fired around 3 a.m., and then saw the teenager, identified as Shaaliver Douse, chasing a man down the street. The teenager, who the police said was brandishing a handgun, fired at the fleeing man; the officers ordered him to drop his weapon, the authorities said.
When the teenager did not, one of the officers fired his service weapon once, and the bullet struck Mr. Douse in the lower left jaw, the police said. The teenager was pronounced dead at the scene. A 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun was recovered there.
The two officers, 26 and 27, according to the police, had been on the streets about a month. They joined the police force in January, but graduated from the Police Academy early last month. Like other new graduates, they were assigned to the department’s Operation Impact, the program that floods high-crime areas with rookie officers.
In May, Mr. Douse was arrested and charged with attempted murder after he was accused of shooting a 15-year-old boy in the shoulder at a gas station in the Bronx. The charges were later dropped.
A city official said investigators believed that Mr. Douse’s pursuit of the man on Sunday might have been related to the earlier shooting. The victim in the shooting in May, who belonged to a gang called the Lyman Avenue crew, had been embroiled in a dispute with a rival gang called the Nine, of which Mr. Douse might have been a member, the official said.
The charges against Mr. Douse were dropped after the shooting victim and another witness stopped cooperating with prosecutors, forcing them to abandon the case, the official said. Investigators are now looking into the possibility that Mr. Douse had been chasing another rival gang member when he encountered the two officers on Sunday.
