A Brooklyn man was convicted of manslaughter on Friday for shooting a Guyanese teenager who was at the time babysitting her three-year-old cousin.
Online news reports said that 16-year-old Shemel Mercurius used her dying breaths to tell Police that Taariq Stephens, now 25, was her attacker.
Stephens shot her with a submachine rifle while she was babysitting her three-year-old cousin in 2016. Police subsequently kicked down the East Flatbush apartment door to find a blood-spattered boy crying, next to the dying teen.
One NYPD officer tried to help Mercurius while they waited around 20 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. She told them that Stephens had wanted to date her but she wasn’t interested. She later died at a local hospital.
Standing trial in the Brooklyn Supreme Court, Stephens was acquitted by jurors of murder but they found him guilty of manslaughter, criminal possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of a child.
Stephens is scheduled to be sentenced on January 16, 2018.
