Javits Frimpong, 15, chased and fatally shot on his way to school in the Bronx

Father says son was bullied at DreamYard preparatory school before the attack

A teenage boy from Ghana was chased down and fatally shot Thursday morning as he made his way to school in the Bronx.

The New York City police department received a report of a shooting near Corona Park in the Bronx on Thursday morning, a police spokesperson said on Friday. At about 9.24am, responding officers found Javits Frimpong, 15, with a gunshot wound to his stomach. Frimpong was transported to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Police have not made any arrests, and an investigation is ongoing as authorities search for three teenage boys in connection with the shooting.

Surveillance footage reportedly captured Frimpong running as a person wearing all black trailed behind him. Another angle of video footage appeared to show masked individuals in dark clothing fleeing the site of the shooting.

The killing has rocked the Bronx’s Claremont neighborhood and the city’s West African community.

“I lost him,” the teenager’s father, Thomas Frimpong, told reporters on Thursday. “I don’t know what to do now.”

The fatal shooting came as Javits marked one year of being in New York after arriving from Ghana, his father said. Frimpong described his son as “clever” and “quiet”.

Javits was being bullied at the DreamYard preparatory school, according to his father. Frimpong said the high school’s principal, who could not be reached for comment by phone or email, informed him recently that two students were suspended for harassing Javits.

An NYPD spokesperson declined to comment on Friday on whether the reports of bullying were related to the attack.

Ghana’s minister of foreign affairs, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, condemned the attack in a statement on Friday. “We will pursue justice and we will make sure that those who did this do not get away with it,” Ablakwa said.

The Ghana diaspora public affairs collective, a US-based non-profit, also addressed the killing in a Friday statement. “Just one year ago, Javits arrived in the United States from Ghana to reunite with his father and begin a new chapter of his life,” the group said. “Like so many Ghanaian immigrant families, his family came together in America with hopes of greater opportunity, security, and a promising future.”

“That future has now been violently taken away,” the group said.