Woman Is Fatally Shot in Bronx Crossfire

A 61-year-old woman was fatally shot on Monday night in the Bronx during crossfire after two groups of men began arguing nearby with guns drawn, the police said.

The shooting was the latest violent episode in New York City, where officials are grappling with a surge in pandemic shootings that shows little sign of abating.

The woman was shot in the back on East 188th Street, Deputy Chief Erik Hernandez told reporters at a news conference late Monday. A preliminary investigation confirmed that the gunfire came from the same street, where the armed men were fighting, he said. The police did not immediately release the woman’s name.

“We do not yet know what that dispute was about, but we do know that an innocent bystander lost her life,” the New York City police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, told reporters during the news conference.

No arrests had been made as of early Tuesday, Detective Adam Navarro of the New York Police Department said by telephone.

Officers who arrived at the site shortly after 7 p.m. on Monday tried to resuscitate the woman using C.P.R. She was pronounced dead at St. Barnabas Hospital, Chief Hernandez said at the news conference.

Dozens of detectives planned to canvass for witnesses and collect physical and video evidence overnight, he added.

“This is a tragic incident,” he said. “This person was just walking down the street. She had no involvement in this dispute whatsoever.”

New York City has experienced a surge in gun violence over the last two years that has mirrored a similar one across the United States. The violence in New York has mainly occurred in lower-income neighborhoods with predominantly Black and Latino residents. It has increased some residents’ anxiety about public safety and tested a campaign pledge by Mayor Eric Adams, who took office at the start of the year, to soothe their fears.

Last July, a 13-year-old boy was killed outside a Bronx cafe in what the police believed had been a gang shooting. In November, also in the Bronx, two police offers were shot in a gun battle while responding to a report of a man with a gun. And in January, a police officer was shot and wounded while scuffling with an armed teenager in the Bronx. The police said the 16-year-old had gang ties.

On one weekend last month, 29 people were shot across the city, including two patrons at a bar in Queens, a man on a subway platform in Brooklyn and a Jamaican immigrant who was killed after an argument in the Bronx. And last week, a 12-year-old boy, Kade Lewin, was fatally shot in the head as he shared a meal with relatives in a parked car in Brooklyn.