Man arrested, charged in fatal shooting of 17-year-old girl in Brooklyn apartment building
EAST NEW YORK, Brooklyn (WABC) -- A man has been arrested for for allegedly shooting a 17-year-old girl inside an apartment building in Brooklyn.
Police say 22-year-old Javone Duncan shot the Raelynn Cameron in the chest on Oct. 10 inside a vacant apartment in East New York.
He and another man are the suspected of carrying her from the sixth floor of the building to the lobby where she was found bleeding to death. When police arrived, they followed the blood trail back to Apt. 6R, a vacant apartment on the sixth floor.
One .9mm shell casing was discovered in the vacant apartment's kitchen, and blood stains were found on a couch in the living room near the kitchen.
Duncan has been charged with murder and criminal possession of a weapon.
The victim, who lived in Far Rockaway, Queens, was able to talk to first responders as she was rushed to the hospital, but she was not able to identify the gunman at the time before she was pronounced dead at Brookdale University Hospital.
She spent a lot of time in Brooklyn where she went to school. She was in her first semester at Medgar Evers after graduating from high school in the spring.
Her family is struggling to understand how her life was so violently cut short -- just shy of her 18th birthday.
"She was a great kid, and she was caught in one of those positions where you have somebody who just don't want to give up on, so you try to be with them every step of the way and an accident happened," her brother Ralik Smith said. "An irreversible accident."
The person she didn't want to give up on, according to her brother, was their cousin, who she was with when the tragic incident happened.
"She was at a point in life where she was really changing herself, making progress," Smith said. "And she just wanted to bring somebody to that level with her. And unfortunately, their bad habits and history caught up with the both of them. But she's the one that paid with her life."
Her brother says Raelynn also joined the track team, was committed to her church and her education, eventually hoping to major in business and minor in dance.
He says she was close with their cousin, and he cautioned them both to be careful who they associated with.
"Affiliation is a dangerous thing," Smith said. "That's how we're losing a lot of our young lives, the next generation, through affiliation. And for those young lives who are trying to work and bring that friend up and keep doing that, just be safe. And it's OK if you have to snitch, it's OK."
Smith said he just wants the people who know what happened to be honest and let the investigation get to the facts.
Two women who reported the shooting to 911 were interviewed by detectives, as were a group of teens who were on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting.
There's no word on a motive for the crime.
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