A New York family is angry and grieving after 1-year-old Davell Gardner, Jr., was shot and killed while at a family cookout in Brooklyn on Sunday night.
According to Fox News, the boy was sitting in his stroller at the cookout, which was in the vicinity of the Raymond Bush Park near Bedford-Stuyvesant, when two unidentified assailants came up to the gathering just before midnight and began shooting.
Little Davell was shot in the stomach and ultimately died at a local hospital early Monday.
“You took my son’s life,” Davell Gardner, Sr., told the network “I can’t get that back. I can’t hold him no more. I can’t hear him calling me ‘daddy’ no more. I can’t kiss him no more. I can’t play with him no more.
“I’ve got to put my son in the ground now,” the grieving father added. “He’s only 1. His birthday is in two months. He didn’t live to see 2. He didn’t live life. It’s like, I wanted to get him out of this violence before something like this happened.”
According to The New York Times, three men were also wounded in the shooting that took little Davell’s life, but all are expected to survive.
“This is so painful,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news briefing about the incident on Monday. “It’s not something we can ever look away from.”
Meanwhile, Davell’s grandmother Samantha Gardner came down hard on the “cowards” who took her grandson’s life.
“You can go to hell,” she said addressing the gunmen. “Excuse my expression, but you took something that was precious for me, precious for my son, something precious for his mother, and we will never see him. He cannot come back. He cannot wake back up. He was an innocent little baby and he’s gone forever.”
“For the cowards that did this, you should be ashamed of yourself because everybody talks about Black Lives Matter. What about baby lives? What about teenager lives?” she added. “You took an innocent child from [his] mother and father as well as the grandparents, and I don’t think it’s fair.”