Nigerian boy was fatally shot in the head while playing basketball at a playground in Brooklyn.
Timothy Oyebola lived in Jamaica, Queens and attended Brooklyn Ascend HS. He was in the Chester Playground in Brownsville at 4 p.m. when he was gunned down.
Officers found the boy, Oluwadurotimi Joseph Oyebola, known as Timi, with a gunshot wound to his head, he had been playing basketball after school with three friends at Chester Playground, which is next to Public School 396, when at least one or two people fired shots from the southern end of the park, Assistant Chief Jeffrey Maddrey told reporters.
Two males were seen fleeing south on Chester Street, the police said.
Deputy Chief Michael Kemper said the shots were fired more than 100 feet away from the boys,
he said;
“He was a really, really good kid,” he said. “There’s a strong possibility that he was the unintended target of this bullet.”
Oluwadurotimi was in 11th grade at Brooklyn Ascend High School in Brownsville, said Steven F. Wilson, the chief executive of the Ascend charter school network. Oluwadurotimi’s school is about a half-mile west of the playground where he was shot.
Oluwadurotimi moved to New York with his parents and sister from Lagos, Nigeria, in 2013, said his father, David Oyebola.
“He was a good boy. He was my strength,” Mr. Oyebola said. “It’s a big loss that I can never recover from.”
Oluwadurotimi’s favorite subjects in school were math and science, his father said, and he wanted to have a career as a doctor or engineer.
In November, he was scheduled to accept a national award for academic achievement at Columbia University.