Red Hook Shooting Suspects Won't Be Charged for Murder of Unborn Child

Red Hook shooting suspect Marquise Frederick, 19. Photo courtesy of the NYPD.

The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office slapped Brooklyn residents Quamari McAllister and Marquise Frederick, both 19, with a slew of charges on Thursday.

The two teens are accused of pulling an SUV up to 9A Dwight Street in Red Hook on Monday night, then spraying bullets into a crowd of people gathered outside the apartment building.

Five 19- to- 20-year-olds were injured in the shooting — including Special-Caijae Houston, who was reportedly five months pregnant at the time. Her unborn child died after the attack.

Frederick is suspected to have been the main shooter and McAllister the driver, according to the New York Daily News.

An NYPD spokesperson tells Patch that both teens have been charged with five counts each of the following crimes.

• Attempted murder in the second degree
• Assault
• Criminal facilitation
• Criminal possession in the second degree
• Menacing in the second degree

But there’s one crime they weren’t charged with, in any degree: homicide.

Charisma Troiano, press secretary for the Brooklyn DA’s Office, says that under section 125.05 of New York’s Penal Law, a “person” capable of being considered a victim in a homicide is defined as a “human being who has been born and is alive.”

Troiano explains that “as such, under the statute, a fetus is not a person as it relates to a homicide victim.”

New York is one of only around a dozen U.S. states that haven’t amended their “born alive” laws to consider a violent attack on a fetus a homicide.

Such amendments are sometimes difficult to pass without interfering with the pro-choice movement.

“The issue we were wrestling with is how you can hold offenders accountable and have some semblance of justice and not interfere with a woman’s reproductive rights,” Colorado State Rep. Mike Foote told the Associated Press earlier this year.

Still, about 39 states have managed to create an exception in their penal codes.

As of Wednesday morning, Red Hook shooting victim Special-Caijae Houston, a camp counselor, was reportedly undergoing surgery at Lutheran Medical Center in Sunset Park.

Houston lists herself on Facebook as a program director at Good Shepherd Services, a service agency for families and kids that says it gives “vulnerable youth in New York City the opportunity to take ownership of their future, making a difference today and for the next generation.”

NYPD officials and Brooklyn politicians have attributed the August 2 shooting to an ongoing gang feud between young men living in Red Hook and at the Gowanus Houses in Boerum Hill.

“This was about a retaliatory shooting on the wrong block,” Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said at a news conference. “This family had nothing to do with the senseless madness the shooters carried out.”