A 78-year-old Bronx man was shot and killed by a stray bullet outside his own home while sitting with his brother on a Thursday morning, and by Tuesday night, his neighbors had turned a courtyard bench into a shrine.
Edgar Spence was eating and drinking outside Mitchel Houses, a NYCHA development at 300 East 138th Street in Mott Haven, when gunfire broke out around 10:25 a.m. on April 16. He wasn’t the target. He was just outside.
NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny laid out what happened: members of the ABG gang, short for “Anybody Gets It,” had gathered at Mitchel Houses for a vigil for a gang member who died in 2023. A group affiliated with the Nine Racks Crips walked in. Both groups opened fire. Eight shots total.
Spence caught one in the chest.
“He’s sitting outside with his brother, eating and drinking, and he catches one to the chest, hits his heart, pierces his aorta, he bleeds internally and dies,” Kenny said.
Police have identified two shooters. They’re still pulling surveillance video and submitting footage to facial recognition to identify others involved. Both groups are subsets of Crips, and Mitchel Houses is considered ABG territory. Kenny described the dynamics plainly: when ABG members saw 30 people walking in, they assumed it was a confrontation. They pulled weapons. The other group fired back. Bystanders paid the price.
“It could be as simple as mistaken identity, but you’re in Mitchell, that’s your area,” Kenny said. “When you see a group of 30 people walking in, they think it’s on, so they pull out and start shooting at the group, and then they shoot back, so that it’s quite common for people to be mistaken as the ops. And unfortunately, you get shot. And then you got this poor guy sitting out there drinking a beer, and he catches one to the chest.”
Council Member Elsie Encarnación attended the vigil, along with NYPD officials, the anti-violence group Guns Down Life Up, and representatives from Public Advocate Jumaane Williams’ office and Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark’s office. Residents from Mitchel Houses and nearby NYCHA developments filled the courtyard as Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” played. Mourners covered Spence’s bench with flowers, candles, and garlands.
Activist Rev. Kevin McCall didn’t let the moment stay sentimental. He named three victims. Spence, 78, in the Bronx. Kaori Patterson-Moore, seven months old, in Brooklyn. Jaden Pierre, 15, in Queens. Three bystanders, three boroughs, all dead from stray rounds in gang-related shootings.
“We have to demand accountability. We have to demand where these guns are coming from,” McCall said.
That’s the question nobody at City Hall has fully answered.
Judy Brandon, 71, moved out of Mitchel Houses in 2002. She came back Tuesday for the vigil. She still volunteers at a nearby senior center and said she stayed close with Spence over the years. The Bronx Times captured her words from the courtyard: “Our last words to one another were ‘I love you,’ and he said he loved me.”
Brandon said she had to leave the neighborhood to survive it. She’s still watching it bury people she knows.
The killing lands inside a broader pattern that anti-violence advocates have flagged repeatedly: NYCHA developments absorbing the worst of gang conflict because of territorial geography, while older residents and children bear the consequences. Mitchel Houses sits in one of the Bronx’s most densely populated public housing corridors. Spence had every right to sit outside on a spring morning. He’s dead because two gangs decided the same courtyard was a battlefield.
NYPD’s investigation is active. Surveillance footage review is ongoing, and detectives are working facial recognition submissions to build out the suspect list beyond the two already identified. No arrests have been announced.
The NYCHA development’s management and the city’s broader public housing safety apparatus now face renewed pressure from community members who showed up Tuesday not just to grieve but to push for answers on how weapons keep moving into these corridors unchecked. Anti-violence organizations including Guns Down Life Up have called for more coordinated intervention before the next vigil becomes necessary. The Bronx District Attorney’s office has not announced charges in connection with Spence’s death.