NOT WORTH A LIFE: A trendy Marmot winter parka like this led to the slaying of Raphael Ward.
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A Lower East Side teenager was senselessly slaughtered after he refused to hand over his trendy Marmot winter parka to a gang of thugs, police sources said yesterday.
In an eerie twist, the victim, Raphael Ward, 16, had hours earlier inexplicably foretold of his murder in a Facebook post: “I’m dead,” according to his friends.
Ward, whose Facebook name was “BloccBoy Tokyo” took one fatal bullet to the chest in front of the DeWitt Reformed Church at 280 Rivington St. about 9 p.m. on Friday, just a stone’s throw from where he lived with his mom and kid brother in the city’s Baruch Houses on Columbia Street.
The gunman, described as 5-foot-6, 120 to 140 pounds, was wearing a dark wool hat and a ski mask when he walked up to Ward in the 32 degree cold and shot him just minutes after the altercation over the jacket, police sources said.
After he was shot, a dying Ward — still wearing his bloodied parka — stumbled across the street to the Tearedhan convenience store and told workers there he had been approached by a group of people who had wanted his jacket, police sources said.
The Marmot parkas can sell for as much as $600.
Police are looking at security-camera video that may have captured the coldblooded murder.
The victim’s stunned friend Cynthia Nieves, 14, said she met Ward just before he was gunned down. Although he didn’t tell her what was wrong, he warned her: “Go home!”
“He knew they were coming back,” she said.
Nicholas Ramos, 18, said he and Ward went to get a slice of pizza across from the church, but Ward “stopped to talk to somebody and I went across the street to the pizza place, and that’s when he got shot,” said Ramos.
Ramos said he heard several shots, but waited a minute before he ran out to help Ward. The victim was later declared dead at Beth Israel Hospital.
A police source said Ward had one prior arrest in November 2011, for possession of pot and trespassing.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said his lifelong pal Will Claudio, 16. “We’ve been close friends since elementary school at PS 140 and he was always a good student, never in trouble, just a real good kid.”
“He was a baseball player, we played together with the Hawks and the Orioles, Boys Club teams, until we got too old and then he played basketball and he was a great basketball player in the community leagues, but he was also really humble,” Claudio recalled.
He added that Ward doted on his 7-year-old brother. “You would have thought that he was his son. In fact a lot of people did.”
His mother, Ali Delgado, was too distraught to talk yesterday.
State Sen. Daniel Squadron reacted to Ward’s murder, the first homicide of the new year in Manhattan.
“We must continue to work together as a community to fight the scourge of gun violence and make our homes and our streets safer for our families. From stronger gun laws to improved safety at NYCHA developments, we are reminded far too often that the time to act is now.”