A teenager who was gunned down outside a swanky Soho hotel was an avid basketballer who played in a league run by an anti-gun violence group, loved ones said Wednesday.
Mahki Brown, 16, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, died after being shot in the head by a Citi Bike-riding gunman opposite the Dominick Hotel on Spring Street in a brazen broad daylight attack shortly before 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, police said.
The teen, who also took two bullets to the leg, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital where he was pronounced dead, cops added.
His mom, Sean, was too distraught to speak at length about losing her only child, but sobbed that he had only just tattooed her name on his arm.
“He’s always trying to help somebody. He helps everybody,” she said outside their apartment Wednesday.
Police haven’t yet revealed a motive in the slaying, but law enforcement sources said the shooting, which occurred opposite the Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, may have been school-related.
The slain teen was a student at the nearby Broome Street Academy Charter High School, sources added.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Brown was the intended target, but sources said the gunfire may have erupted following a dispute between two groups of girls earlier that day.
“I was with him,” the teen’s distraught girlfriend told The Post. “It’s hard. I just keep seeing him on the ground.”
Another friend, who lived in the same Rutland Plaza complex as Brown, said the young couple “were inseparable.
“The only time you see Mahki is when he’s walking with his girl,” the friend said. “I was crying earlier. It just hit me… I thought I was going to push it off but I couldn’t. I did cry.”
Family friend Lakesha Jenkins told The Post the family didn’t know what led to the shooting – only that Brown was helping a friend at the time.
“He is a caring person. He is a respectful kid,” Jenkins said outside the teen’s apartment. “We all have love for him.”
His basketball coach, Jessica Jenkins, echoed that sentiment.
“He’s very respectful,” she said. “He was passionate about the game.”
“Mahki was his own favorite basketball player,” she laughed, when asked who his favorite player was.
The Brooklyn-based 67th Precinct Clergy Council, known as “The Godsquad”, also paid tribute to the slain teen, saying he’d played on the nonprofit’s basketball team.
“Our hearts are broken by the news of one of our own Team GodSquad members, 16 yr old Mahkai Brown, shot and killed in SOHO by shooters riding on Citi Bikes,” an Instagram post read.
The group, which acts as a liaison between cops and the community in a bid to stamp out gun violence, called on Citibike to help end what it described as “Bike-bys.”
No arrests have yet been made in Brown’s slaying, according to cops.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, an injured Brown collapsed in an alley next to the Dominick Hotel, horrified witnesses recalled.
“It was sickening,” Justo Cruz, a security guard who works in the area, told The Post.
“He was just laid down, looking unconscious. I saw some blood on the shirt but I didn’t look. Nothing nice. That was a human on the floor. That was movie-like.”
“No matter how nice a place is or stuff like that, you always kind of have to be on high alert in a sense,” Cruz added. “Soho — good vibes, good energy, very diverse. You don’t expect certain things in a nice area.”
Meanwhile, a nearby parking attendant said he ran for cover after hearing at least two gunshots.
“I was protecting myself because you didn’t know where the sound was coming from,” he said. “People were running, so I also ran.”
Additional reporting by Jorge Fitz-Gibbon
