The stray bullet that killed a beloved 92-year-old woman as she sat in her Bronx home was fired by a teen trying to break up a noisy gang fight that was “bugging” him, police sources said yesterday.
Jamal Blair, 18, was charged with murder for what he described as a “warning shot.”
“He was standing there looking as though the ruckus was bugging him, and he figured firing a shot would stop the fighting,” a police source said.
“He was being a macho man.”
The bullet sailed down East 224th Street, through victim Sadie Mitchell’s window, piercing her leg and settling in her lungs, sources said.
Blair allegedly confessed to the shooting and expressed remorse.
“It was an accident,” the dejected-looking youth told reporters as he was escorted handcuffed into a Bronx station house.
But he changed his tune on the way out, whining, “I didn’t do it. I was framed by the police. The police did it, they framed me, man. No justice.”
In his initial interview with cops, Blair said his gunfire was meant to break up a large brawl on the Wakefield street, where the youths were fighting with bats and sticks, sources said.
That fight was sparked earlier in the day when a teen from the Edenwald Houses was assaulted by thugs from elsewhere in the neighborhood.
A police source said Blair, who lives nearby, was not part of the fighting groups, although he knew members of one of them.
Surveillance video shows Blair — who uses the nickname “Fish” — sprinting from the scene seconds after the shooting.
A cop who had arrested him last week recognized him from the footage. Blair had ditched a green jacket he was wearing on the video, but his other clothes matched the description.
Blair has at least five arrests, mainly for drug possession.
Mitchell’s daughter said she’s relieved by the arrest, but won’t celebrate until there’s a guilty verdict.
“I’m feeling better than I did, but. . . until somebody is convicted, there will be no closure for me,” said Shahron Van Rooij, a college professor from Virginia.
She had no interest in hearing Blair’s tale of trying to break up the fight.
“I have more important things to think about,” she said. “I’m arranging my mother’s funeral.”
Mitchell, a former religion teacher who was a regular at Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church and volunteered at local homeless centers, had recently complained to her daughter that the neighborhood she’d lived in for more than 50 years had become dangerous.
But she refused to leave the home she’d lived in with her late husband, Van Rooij said.
Additional reporting by Douglas Montero