A Queens man was arrested for fatally shooting a Connecticut teen after an argument outside a bar in Manhattan shortly after midnight on Friday, according to police and news reports.
Ruddy Osias, 27, was arrested and charged with second degree murder and criminal possession of a firearm, the NYPD said Saturday evening.
Osias faces the charges for allegedly shooting Erica Lopez, a 19-year-old from Norwalk, Connecticut who was with a 21-year-old man in Manhattan at East 26th Street and Fifth Avenue late Thursday night. Lopez was shot in the chest about 12:30 a.m. Friday and the man was shot in the leg, the NYPD said.
Both were treated at Bellevue Hospital, where Lopez died. The man, identified by multiple reports as Lopez's boyfriend Andres Arias, was in stable condition.
Osias was remanded at a video arraignment Saturday night.
The shooting was reportedly sparked by an argument after Lopez and Arias had met a group of people at 230 Fifth Rooftop, a rooftop bar in the Flatiron District where the couple was celebrating his cousin's boyfriend's birthday, according to the Daily Mail.
The news site reported that a woman in the other group had groped Lopez and another person, causing the argument.
Arias told the outlet that a group followed them in a car after the argument, when the alleged shooter fired his gun into the air and then yelled out, "Do we have a problem?" Then he shot towards the couple, killing Lopez and injuring Arias.
Manhattan District Attorney Alissa Wimmer said during the arraignment, "The defendant himself made an inculpatory statement where he identified himself in the videos as being the shooter and admitted to possessing and firing the gun several times."
Security camera videos have not been viewed by Osias's lawyer, Michelle Grant, who emphasized Osias has a clean record, according to the Post. His next court date is July 28th, records show.
Lopez's friend Alma Corona told CBS2 she was "beautiful inside and out, responsible, caring for everyone that she knew around her."
"Everything good you can imagine in someone, she had everything," the friend said.
Shootings have increased in recent weeks in NYC. So far this year, there have been 531 shooting victims, compared to 373 during the same time period last year, according to NYPD statistics as of June 21st. Shooting incidents rose from 329 to 448 year-over-year, the statistics show.
In Brooklyn, two were killed by gunfire around 12:30 p.m. Saturday. Between 11 p.m. Friday and 1 p.m. Saturday, 17 people were injured in shootings, the Post reported.
The shootings have spiked amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a financial crisis, and a national reckoning with systemic racism and police violence as protesters call to reduce the NYPD funding by $1 billion—which the City Council has proposed.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said in a recent video on Twitter that the uptick in shootings shouldn't be ignored, but noted that pre-pandemic and pre-financial crisis, crime was at an all-time-low.
"When we hear people saying, defund the police, divest, reinvestment, what they're saying is that we have to really invest in the things that we know push public safety," Williams said. "We have to get to the real causes of the things that are going on. ... No one wants to be safe more than the people where these crime are upticking."
