The devastated mother of a 15-year-old boy shot dead by another teen in a Bronx apartment said Tuesday she remains “broken” by her son’s sudden and senseless death.
Ketrice Riley lost her son, Riley Billingslea, when another boy, 16, fired off a round inside the Castle Arms apartment building in Kingsbridge on Aug. 12.
“I just hurt!” Riley said as she cried through a heartbreaking vigil held for her son. “I’m broken!”
Riley’s inconsolable mother shared her grief with dozens of mourners who gathered just down the block from the Claflin Ave. apartment building near W. 197th St. where he was killed.
Through her pain, she begged neighborhood teens to stop carrying weapons and hurting each other.
“I need the youth to calm down!” she told the crowd that gathered to honor her son. “Focus on being young. I was young. All I wanted to do was be alive. I wanted to get to the next day. I knew that was important.”
“I need y’all to stop… looking at beef and quarrel with each other,” she continued. “Life is serious. Life is real. You only have one.”
Riley also called on the boy’s killer to turn himself in.
“Riley was a good child,” she said. “You took something special. You hurt me. You hurt the community. You took my baby.”
Also attending the vigil was the victim’s grandmother, who demanded that anyone who may be sheltering the teen suspect immediately hand him over to authorities.
“I want to say to the parents, if you’re hiding him, let him go, let him face justice,” Elain Rogers said at the vigil. “He took my grandson. Riley was a really good kid.”
“I would just ask that the little boy come forward. Explain. Let us understand what happened,” she added.
Another teen was grazed in the shooting. In an exclusive interview with the Daily News, he said he and his friends were “hanging out” in the apartment when the shooter began horsing around with the black handgun in the Claflin Ave. apartment. There were about a half-dozen teens in the apartment at the time of the shooting, he said.
“We were in the house. (He) was playing with the gun, a black gun,” said the teen, whose name is being withheld until the suspect has been arrested. “We told him to take the magazine out of the gun, but he wouldn’t listen to us. I was sitting next to Riley. I was right there next to Riley.”
The next thing the teen knew, his friend was covered in blood.
“I was checking myself and I saw the blood,” he said. “I didn’t want to see that. So I just left. I’m so sorry. It’s emotional. Riley didn’t deserve that.”
Police sources said Riley got into a quarrel with the 16-year-old shooter, who opened his backpack, pulled out a gun, put a magazine in it and fired about 5:20 p.m.
The 13-year-old said he wasn’t sure whether the pair had been arguing, but that he heard the teen shooter say, “I’m going to throw the pain,” before a shot rang out.
That boy said he too would have been killed, but the bullet that struck Billingslea in the head ricocheted off the phone he was holding, altering the round’s trajectory so it grazed his chest instead of passing through it
“If I hadn’t been holding my phone, I would have lost my life,” the teen said. “Everyone at the hospital said I was lucky to be alive.”
After the shooting, he fled for his life, saying, “I got out of there so fast, I left my cell phone and my shoes.”
Riley died at the scene. He lived with his grandmother in an apartment just under a mile away from the Castle Arms.
“We were just boys playing,” the 13-year-old said. “And then suddenly I saw the gun. And then he shot Riley.”
The wounded teen was treated at St. Barnabas Hospital after fleeing to his home.
“Riley was a really good kid. He was,” said Billingslea’s grandmother on Tuesday. “He liked to play basketball. He was all about his friends, and, you know, just being outside, being silly and goofy. He didn’t, he didn’t deserve this.”
The shooter ran off and remained at large Tuesday. No gun was recovered from the scene, police said.