Let this sink in: on Wednesday, a 7-month-old baby girl was murdered by a gangbanger in broad daylight on a Williamsburg street.
The sweet soul’s name was Kaori Patterson-Moore.
Family members described Kaori, with her beautiful big brown eyes, as a bubbly baby who giggled easily. She had just started to say the word “mama.”
Kaori will never utter another syllable again.
But we cannot remain silent about the horror that unfolded thanks to our progressive politicians’ open arm embrace of lawlessness.
She was tucked into her stroller as her family walked down a Williamsburg sidewalk when Amuri Greene, a 21-year-old monster hanging off the back of a moped fired into the crowd of children and adults.
As quickly as he unleashed the terror on unsuspecting innocents, he and his accomplice sped off, like the disgusting cowards they are.
Meanwhile, Kaori’s mother Lianna Charles-Moore, who was also pushing her 2-year-old son, took shelter in a nearby deli with her two kids.
In chilling footage from inside the store, we can see the very moment that Charles-Moore discovered the unthinkable: that her beautiful baby girl had been shot in the head. Her toddler was also grazed by the bullet.
The image of a heartbroken mother will continue to haunt us, and it should.
The senseless slaying of Kaori was sadly the logical conclusion for New York City, which has accepted disorder as just another annoyance of big city life.
This is a place where our elected officials habitually ignore innocent victims of violent crimes, bend over backwards to advocate for the perpetrators and find new ways to handcuff law enforcement.
In metro areas across the country, politicians are minimizing death and destruction caused by illegal immigrants, gangs and repeat offenders, who are regularly set free by soft-on-crime district attorneys.
Here in New York City, Mayor Mamdani was silent about Richard Williams, an 83-year-old veteran who died after being pushed onto the subway tracks by an illegal alien from Honduras with a long rap sheet.
Instead, he chose to extend his prayers and sympathy to the families of two Rikers inmates who died in custody. He publicly promised them justice.
In Providence, pols fought to remove a mural of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska whose throat was slit on public transportation in North Carolina by a mentally unhinged repeat offender who should have been behind bars. Mayor Brett Smiley said the mural “does not represent Providence,” claiming it was “divisive.”
And by doing so, they’ve shown their values align, not with law abiding citizens, but with the merchants of chaos. He might as well have blown a kiss to Zarutska’s murderer and criminals like him.
In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson barely acknowledged the murder of 18-year-old Westchester native Sheridan Gorman, who was shot and killed by an illegal alien from Venezuela two weeks ago as she and her college friends walked on a beach to see the northern lights.
But this is par for the course in the Windy City, where gang violence is rampant and bystanders pay the price. The loudest voices are the activists, who don’t call for more law enforcement but instead villainize the police.
To many of these progressive Democrat politicians, innocent victims are those whose names shall not be spoken.
But with every death we downplay, ignore or enable through lax prosecution, it loosens another bolt in the structure that holds our civil society together. It rubber stamps disorder.
Then there’s the New York Times, who unintentionally underscored this collective apathy toward the bloodshed. In describing the heinous murder of baby Kaori they wrote, “Among shootings in New York City in which a person is struck by a stray bullet, babies are rarely the victims.”
To the Gray Lady, shootings are just another humdrum inconvenience of city life, such as getting stuck between stops on a delayed subway train or having to dodge dog crap on the sidewalk.
Hey, “our shootings don’t usually hit babies” sure is a twisted framing.
Except it has struck a baby. A family is devastated and a beautiful life was snuffed out.
Meanwhile, Mamdani did address the killing of Kaori in one of his X posts writing: “We cannot accept this violence as normal.”
That’s what we’ve been saying all along. Now do something about it.