A reputed gang member locked up in Florida is set to be charged in the tragic slaying of a tennis-loving teen more than a decade after the innocent honor roll student was shot dead at a Bronx park, law-enforcement sources said Friday.
Steve Boria is expected to be extradited to New York to face murder charges for the cold case killing of 14-year-old Kemar Bryan Brooks, a high schooler who was found fatally shot in Haffen Park in July 2012, according to the sources.
The Bronx District Attorney’s Office declined to comment.
Sources said Boria, an apparent member of the Bronx’s “Slut Gang,” was long suspected of gunning down the teen, who was out playing tennis with friends on July 26, 2012 when he was hit by a stray bullet.
The case grew cold, but investigators got a lifeline in 2018 when cops recovered a gun they believed to be the murder weapon, ABC7 reported at the time.
Boria is serving a 15-year prison sentence at a federal lockup in Florida after pleading guilty to gun and drug charges in October 2019.
Federal prosecutors said that Boria, who operated under the nickname “Chrome,” was the “most violent member” of the Slut Gang, a group that terrorized the community around the Bronx’s Boston Secor Houses with shootings, robberies, drug dealing and other crimes.
Boria committed several shootings on behalf of the gang, including one on Sept. 1, 2012 at the public housing complex where he targeted members of the rival 2Fly gang, according to court papers.
The NYCHA development is less than a mile from the park where Brooks would often stay out playing tennis with his friends.
But a thunderstorm on the night of his death forced him to run and seek shelter at a nearby gazebo when he was tragically struck by a stray bullet, cops said at the time.
A witness told cops at the scene that Brooks was with two other people when they appeared to run into the structure to avoid the rain.
The witness also saw the alleged shooter enter the west side of the park and fire toward the pool, which is in the same direction as the gazebo, cops said.
Brooks’ devastated father searched all night for his son, starting when he first scanned the perimeter of the park at around 3 a.m. — before he made the heartbreaking discovery of the boy, lying dead on his side, near his tennis bags and rackets.
“My heart dropped,” Cassell Brooks, Kemar’s father, said in a 2012 interview. “There was no sign of this [happening]. [Kemar] was a brilliant kid. He was not a child who was ever in trouble. He was an A student.”
Kemar — a ninth-grader at the Bronx Academy of Health Careers — was an honor-roll student who bowled and loved playing tennis.
He was the youngest of five siblings, and came to the US from Jamaica just two years before the fatal shooting.
Boria’s attorney in the 2019 case didn’t immediately return a request for comment Friday.
