The young couple spent much of the evening on a porch, enjoying the warmth of a tropical December night, as the first hours of Christmas approached in the Bronx.
They walked to the subway station on Jerome Avenue and said their goodbyes: Lashelle McDonald, 17, up the stairs to the No. 4 train, and Justin Morris, 16, presumably toward his new home in Yonkers, where his mother had moved the family last month to get away from the gangs that still proliferate in parts of New York City.
“I heard the gunshots from the turnstile,” Lashelle said on Friday. A few minutes later, she emerged from the subway at 149th Street and got a text message. It said that Justin had been shot.
Beneath the elevated subway tracks, two groups of men began arguing, according to the police. Before long the verbal dispute took a more violent turn, in a dynamic that has been all too typical.
Several shots were fired around 10:55 p.m., the police said, and the groups of men scattered and fled. Justin was left on the pavement, shot several times in the back. He was pronounced dead at the scene, and his body was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx. Another man, 19, was taken there with two gunshot wounds in his back and a third to his buttocks; he was listed in stable condition.
City officials have said that many of the murders and shootings in New York can be traced to gang-related activities, often tied to disputes among particular housing projects or neighborhoods.
Whatever led Justin back to his old neighborhood in the Bronx on Christmas Eve, and whether he was a participant in the dispute between the groups of men or merely a passer-by, was a mystery to many who knew his family, including Yolanda Flora, who lived in the building at 182nd Street that had been Justin’s home until recently.
No one would know the truth, she said, “unless the streets start talking.”
Justin’s mother was hoping to raise enough money to bury her only son, Ms. Flora added.
“His mother was just trying to get him out of this neighborhood to a better place,” she said. “It breaks my heart.”
Lashelle said Justin had returned to University Heights in the Bronx almost every day since the move to Yonkers. He was trying to turn his life around, she said, and had been a member of gangs, including the Bloods. That made a certain amount of street conflict inevitable, she said.
“When you’re in a gang and you meet with another person in a gang, automatically it’s beef,” Lashelle said.
In the early hours of Christmas, Justin’s mother, Ms. Flora and Lashelle all found themselves at St. Barnabas Hospital, each hoping that what they had heard was untrue. Ms. Flora had heard from a neighbor that Justin might be there and called his mother with that information. Justin’s mother then called St. Barnabas and was told that a young man who had been taken there had a tattoo on his arm that read Siri — Ms. Morris’s first name, Ms. Flora said.
“She’s been too distraught to talk,” Ms. Flora said of Justin’s mother. “That’s her only son.”
A knot of young people gathered on Friday afternoon at 183rd Street and Jerome Avenue, where Justin’s body had been found. A bouquet of pink flowers was on the ground, and a young woman who gave her name only as Miranda placed a yellow piece of cardboard against the side of Las Palmas Bakery on Jerome Avenue, then taped pictures of Justin to it.
Jeremy Maldonado, 19, who said that he lived in the same building where Justin had lived until his mother moved, blinked back tears. The No. 4 train rattled overhead. Some people wrote messages in marker on the yellow cardboard. Others lit tall candles in glass sleeves. A young man dripped multicolored candle wax on the sidewalk to spell out the words “JT will be missed.”
Lashelle stood near the memorial talking quietly with friends. She told them that she had seen Justin’s body at the hospital and felt haunted by the sight.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I could see him in my dreams.”