An alleged gang member in custody in Florida is expected to be charged in the tragic murder of a tennis-loving teenage girl, more than a decade after the innocent honor student was shot and killed in a Bronx park, law enforcement sources said Friday.
Officials said Steve Boria is expected to be extradited to New York to face murder charges in the unsolved murder of Kemar Brian Brooks, a 14-year-old high school student who was found shot to death in Haffenpark in July 2012.
The Bronx District Attorney’s Office declined to comment.
Boria, a suspected member of the Bronx “Slut Gang,” according to sources, had long been suspected of shooting and killing the boy, who was hit by a stray bullet while playing tennis with friends on July 26, 2012.
The case remained unsolved until 2018, when police recovered a gun believed to be the murder weapon, giving investigators a surviving escape. ABC7 reported at the time,.
Boria pleaded guilty to gun and drug charges in October 2019 and is serving a 15-year sentence in federal prison in Florida.
Federal prosecutors said Boria, who went by the nickname “Chrome,” was the “most violent member” of the “Slut Gang,” a group that terrorized the area around the Boston Secor Houses in the Bronx with shootings, robberies, drug trafficking and other crimes.
According to court documents, Boria is accused of several shootings on behalf of the gang, including one targeting rival 2Fly gang members at a public housing complex on Sept. 1, 2012.
The NYCHA development is less than a mile from the park where Brooks often played tennis with friends.
But a thunderstorm on the night of his death forced him to run for shelter in a nearby gazebo, where he was hit by a stray bullet and tragically killed, police said at the time.
Witnesses told officers at the scene that Brooks was with two other people and appeared to have run into the building to get out of the rain.
Witnesses also saw the suspect enter from the west side of the park and fire shots toward the pool, which is in the same direction as the gazebo, police said.
Brooks’ heartbroken father searched for his son throughout the night after first searching the area around the park at about 3am, and experienced the heartbreaking moment when he discovered his son lying dead next to his tennis bag and racquets.
“My heart dropped,” Kemar’s father, Cassell Brooks, said in an interview in 2012. “There were no signs of this. [happening]. [Kemar] He was a very good kid. He wasn’t a troublemaker. He was an A student.”
Kemmer, a ninth-grader at the Bronx Health Occupations Academy, was an honor student who loved bowling and tennis.
He was the youngest of five children and had come to the United States from Jamaica just two years before the deadly shooting.
Boria’s attorney in the 2019 case did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
