DA: Suspect Laughed When He Heard He'd Shot 11-Year-Old Girl
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- A father's heartbreak at a shooting that gravely wounded his daughter was compounded Sunday evening, by a cruel reaction attributed to the teenage boy charged in the shooting.
As CBS 2's Steve Langford reported, the random gunfire and callous response from the suspect have taken a real toll on the extended family of Tayloni Mazyck, 11, who was wounded in the shooting Friday evening at Gates and Throop avenues in Bedford-Styuvesant, Brooklyn.
Tayloni was shot in the neck while she was just standing outside her building with her mother.
"Out of the blue, boom, boom," said Tayloni's father, Robert Mazyck. "She tried to get away, and unfortunately she got hit."
Not far from the scene, a suspect was nabbed, thanks to surveillance video. Kane Cooper, 17, was allegedly aiming at two men walking out of a neighboring building when he fired the shot that wounded Tayloni.
Cooper had a shocking reaction when he was told he shot a child. The Brooklyn District Attorney's office said he laughed.
"That made me want to tear his head off his shoulders," Robert Mazyck said. "That made me angry."
Mazyck, in a rare moment of fury, said he otherwise has been attempting to remain an adult about the shooting of the child he calls his baby.
"I don't hate the guy," Mazyck said. "I just don't like that he'd bring a gun out in broad daylight."
Tayloni was initially taken to Kings County Hospital Center, where she underwent surgery. She was later transferred to New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital, where her recovery was uncertain at best.
"She's paralyzed from the neck," Mazyck said. "Down she's paralyzed."
Mazyck said news of his daughter's shooting has proved to be too much for one family member.
"My grandmother died this morning at 5:07," he said. "This just made her give up."
Now a funeral has to be planned for Mazyck's grandmother, while he and his family maintain a round-the-clock vigil at Tayloni's hospital bed. She had been set to graduate from elementary school at P.S. 44 later this week, and now she may have to celebrate her graduation from inside the hospital.
A father's thoughts could not help but stray back to word that the suspect charged with causing such heartbreak apparently thought it was all so funny.
"So he don't care?" Mazyck said. "When we go to court, justice is going to play its role. He brought that on himself."
Cooper, who was known to officers in the 79th Precinct, was charged with attempted murder and assault.
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