Police captured the second suspect in the drive-by shooting that killed a 7-month-old baby girl on a Brooklyn street, with NYPD detectives tracking down the alleged moped driver in Pennsylvania two days after the attack left an infant dead in her stroller.
Matthew Rodriguez, 18, was apprehended Friday by NYPD detectives working with the U.S. Marshals Regional Fugitive Task Force, according to the Associated Press via Breitbart. Charges against Rodriguez were pending at the time of his arrest. He is believed to have been driving the moped used in the Wednesday afternoon attack that killed Kaori Patterson-Moore.
The suspected triggerman, 21-year-old Amuri Greene, had already been arrested shortly after the shooting. He pleaded not guilty to murder and other charges at a Friday night arraignment and was held without bail. The two suspects now face the justice system for a crime that Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch called "a tragedy that truly shocks the conscience."
The shooting unfolded Wednesday afternoon on a Brooklyn street corner. A court complaint described two men speeding down the street on a moped. Greene, riding on the back, fired into a group of people standing on the corner. Kaori was in her stroller. She was struck in the head.
Her two-year-old brother was grazed by a bullet.
After the gunfire, the moped sped away, and crashed into a car just two blocks from the scene, hurling both men from the vehicle. Fox News reported that surveillance video captured the crash, showing the two suspects flung from the moped during their attempted getaway. Greene was injured and hospitalized in police custody. Rodriguez, the alleged driver, fled on foot.
Greene told police he had been aiming for another person in the crowd, the court complaint stated. He missed his target. He hit a baby instead.
With Greene in custody almost immediately, attention turned to the second man, the one who got away from the crash site. NYPD detectives and U.S. Marshals tracked Rodriguez to Pennsylvania, where he was taken into custody Friday. The specific Pennsylvania location was not disclosed.
AP News confirmed that Rodriguez is believed to have been the moped driver during the drive-by attack. His exact charges had not been announced at the time of his arrest, and police did not publicly detail the relationship, if any, between Rodriguez and Greene.
The fact that Rodriguez ran to another state before being caught underscores why federal fugitive task forces exist. That he was found within 48 hours is a credit to the detectives who tracked him. But none of it brings Kaori Patterson-Moore back.
Kaori's mother, Lianna Charles-Moore, told the New York Post that she initially thought the sounds were fireworks. She was comforting her startled two-year-old son, who had been grazed by a bullet, when she saw her baby daughter bleeding.
Charles-Moore's words were plain and devastating:
"My daughter was innocent. She didn't deserve that."
No, she didn't. Seven months old. In a stroller. On a street corner in broad daylight. The randomness of it, a man on the back of a moped spraying bullets into a crowd in the middle of the afternoon, is the kind of violence that has made parts of America's cities feel dystopian to the people who actually live in them.
Investigators have been examining whether the shooting had gang-related roots. The New York Post reported that authorities were exploring whether Kaori's father, Jamari Patterson, may have been the intended target due to possible associations with members of the Money Over Everything gang. NYPD Chief of Detectives Joe Kenny said at the time that investigators knew the father had "an association with some other MOE gang members."
Greene himself told police he was aiming at someone else in the crowd. Whether that someone was Kaori's father or another individual has not been publicly confirmed. What is confirmed: the bullet found a baby.
Greene faces murder, attempted murder, and assault charges. His attorney, Jay Schwitzman, said after court that he would conduct "an independent and thorough investigation of the facts and circumstances of this tragic incident." Greene pleaded not guilty.
Commissioner Tisch addressed the shooting at a Wednesday news briefing:
"This is a terrible day in our city, a tragedy that truly shocks the conscience."
Mayor Zohran Mamdani expressed heartbreak and outrage over Kaori's death. The words are appropriate. But words from City Hall have become a familiar ritual in New York, the press conference, the condemnation, the promise of justice, then the next shooting.
The question that officials never seem to answer is the one that matters most to the families on those street corners: What changes so this doesn't happen again? Two men on a moped, one of them firing a gun into a crowd in broad daylight on a Wednesday afternoon, that is not a freak event. That is a city where certain neighborhoods remain trapped in a cycle of gang violence that claims the most vulnerable victims.
The pattern of shootings sparking political fallout without producing lasting policy change is by now depressingly familiar in American cities.
Several questions remain open. What specific charges will Rodriguez face? What is his connection to Greene? Where exactly in Pennsylvania was he hiding, and did anyone help him flee? Was Kaori's father the intended target, or was it someone else in the crowd?
The court complaint establishes the basic mechanics of the attack, moped, two men, gunfire into a crowd, but the full picture of motive and planning has yet to emerge. Rodriguez's pending charges may shed more light once they are filed.
Meanwhile, the broader pattern of urban gun violence continues to exact its toll on the people least able to escape it. The victims are overwhelmingly residents of neighborhoods where disorder and violence have become a persistent fact of life, not a political talking point, but a daily reality.
Greene is behind bars without bail. Rodriguez is in custody. The system is processing them. But Kaori Patterson-Moore is gone, and her two-year-old brother carries a bullet graze as a reminder of the afternoon his sister was killed.
Accountability for the shooters is the bare minimum. The harder question, why a 21-year-old and an 18-year-old were on a moped firing into a crowd in broad daylight, and what a city intends to do about it beyond holding press conferences, is one that New York's leaders have yet to answer with anything beyond grief and outrage. Grief and outrage, by themselves, have never stopped a bullet.
A seven-month-old baby deserved better from the city that was supposed to keep her safe. So does every family still standing on those corners.
