Thirteen days after Javits Frimpong was shot in the stomach on his way to school in the Bronx, police have charged a 17-year-old with his murder. Javits was 15. He had moved from Ghana to New York a year earlier to live with his father and finish his education.
Detectives picked up the teenager at his Bronx home on Wednesday morning and questioned him at the NYPD’s 42nd Precinct. He faces charges of murder, manslaughter and firearms offenses, according to ABC News and local reports. Police are not naming him because of his age. He is charged, not convicted, and the NYPD has not ruled out more arrests.
Javits was shot on Oct. 29 near Crotona Park and died at St. Barnabas Hospital. Police released surveillance footage of a person in a black sweatsuit and mask running from the scene. They had been looking for three teenagers in black sweatsuits and blue surgical masks, who they say ran to the Freeman Street station, jumped the turnstile and boarded a No. 5 train to Manhattan.
An arrest answers who. It does not answer why, and for a Black immigrant family that is the harder question. Javits’s father, Thomas Frimpong, has said his son told the family he was being bullied at DreamYard Preparatory School, where he was a student. NYPD Chief Joe Kenny said police are “working with the Department of Education to verify” whether bullying played a role. Police have not said that it did.
At a press conference, Javits’s mother, Doris Gyamfi, who flew in from Ghana, said: “I need justice for my child. That’s all, I have only one child.” His father said: “I brought Javits from Ghana to continue his education here in the United States… He was very, very, very excited.” His sister, Millicent Boateng, said he wanted to be a physician or to join the military.
The family’s attorney, Ben Crump, is asking for a full Department of Education investigation into what school officials knew and what they did about the bullying before Oct. 29. That is the right demand. A charge against one teenager closes one part of this case. It does not tell a family whether a new student from West Africa reported being hurt and was ignored.
The city’s schools have a duty to answer that, in writing, whatever the criminal case finds. If the school had reports and did nothing, a boy’s last year of promise belongs on its record too. Javits’s funeral is scheduled for Nov. 20.

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