On March 31, 2022, a 12-year-old boy was eating a meal with his cousins inside a parked sedan in Brooklyn when a black Mercedes pulled to a stop next to them. Two gunmen opened fire.
The boy who was sitting in the front seat, Kade Lewin, was struck in the head and chest. He was pronounced dead at the scene in East Flatbush, while his older cousin was critically injured.
Police said that the gunman most likely mistook Kade for someone else, a rival gang member. For more than four years, there were no arrests made in his killing, which horrified many New Yorkers at a time when murders had surged in the city.
On Thursday, federal prosecutors said they had made a breakthrough, announcing the indictment of three men who they said were members of a violent street gang and took part in the killing. The purpose of the shooting, they wrote in a letter to a federal judge, was to “target an associate of a rival gang,” whom they misidentified.
Ousmane Diallo and Mayel Bussereth opened fire on Kade, prosecutors said, while a third man, Jonah Luc, was in the back seat of the Mercedes. All three men appeared in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Thursday and pleaded not guilty.
Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, credited members of various law enforcement agencies who he said “relentlessly pursued justice for this innocent child.”
Kade’s killing became a grim symbol of a wave in violence in New York during and in the years following the pandemic, reversing hard-won progress in neighborhoods that had been ravaged by gang warfare. In the years since, violent crime in the city has fallen once more.
Days after the killing, Mayor Eric Adams, who had campaigned on a promise to improve public safety, appeared at a news conference with Kade’s family. He held a pair of the boy’s white and blue Nike sneakers by their laces. East Flatbush, a middle-class Black neighborhood, had seen a startling spike in violence.
“They’ll never get over this moment,” Mr. Adams said. “Whose child is next?”
Mr. Diallo, 24, is serving a 14-year state sentence in upstate New York for attempted murders, while Mr. Luc, 25, is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of stealing government funds in June. Mr. Bussereth, 26, was arrested on Thursday morning.
If convicted of the most serious charges, the three men face life in prison or the death penalty. Mr. Luc admitted to investigators last year that he was in the car, prosecutors said.
On the evening of the shooting, surveillance footage provided by prosecutors captured the three men, along with an unnamed co-conspirator, leaving an apartment in Crown Heights in the Mercedes. Before arriving to the spot where Kade was sitting with his cousins, the vehicle initially circled the block several times.
After Mr. Diallo and Mr. Bussereth opened fire, prosecutors said, the car was seen driving to another neighborhood in Brooklyn. From there, the four men were picked up by a white sedan and escorted back to the apartment in Crown Heights.
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