A 12-year-old boy was arrested on Sunday night after the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn earlier that day, the police said.
The 12-year-old is being charged with second-degree manslaughter, also known as reckless homicide, and with criminally negligent homicide and criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree, the police said.
The police have not released the name of either boy. They were cousins and were in the living room of a family member’s apartment when the gun went off, a law enforcement official said.
Dushoun Almond, who runs Brownsville In Violence Out, an anti-violence organization in the neighborhood, said family members had told him the boys had been playing with the gun when it went off. It was unclear how the boys got the weapon.
One of the boys was visiting the other in the apartment, Mr. Almond said.
“It was a fatal accident, but nonetheless, it was an accident,” Mr. Almond said.
The police said they received a 911 call on Sunday around 10:24 a.m. about a shooting at 80 Osborn Street.
When they arrived, they found a 14-year-old boy who had been shot in the chest. He was unconscious and unresponsive.
He was taken to Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
In recent weeks, the police have expressed alarm at the number of teenagers who are being killed by other teenagers.
At a news conference last Wednesday, where Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, announced the takedown of a gang that had killed two teenagers in a three-year span, officials bemoaned the toll that gun violence was taking on children and teenagers in New York City and across the country.
“It’s a sad and shocking reality that the leading cause of death among children and teens in America is now gun violence,” Mr. Gonzalez said.
According to an analysis published by the journal Pediatrics last year, from 2011 through 2021, the rate of firearm fatalities among children under 18 increased by 87 percent in the United States. The death rate attributable to car accidents fell by almost half, leaving firearm injuries the top cause of accidental death in children.
The district attorney’s office said the Brownsville case would be handled by the city’s Family Court division, which takes on juvenile cases. A spokesman for that agency did not have an immediate comment on the case.
Mr. Almond said it was essential that law enforcement officials and outreach workers band together to help the 12-year-old boy, who “will have to live with this traumatic experience the rest of his life.”
“I don’t believe he should be locked away,” he said. “We can’t just let the system swallow him up.”
