Alberto Amir Roque, a 16-year-old male from the Bronx who was described in reporting as Latino, was caught in a sudden, street-level eruption of violence on the night of June 17, 2024. It was just after 9 p.m. when gunfire tore through East 162nd Street near Third Avenue, an area lined with small businesses and heavy foot traffic, and only steps from the NYPD’s 42nd Precinct.
Officers responding to a 911 call found him down on the sidewalk with a gunshot wound to the head, and medics rushed him to NYC Health + Hospitals/Lincoln in critical condition. He was pronounced dead the next day, June 18.
The first accounts painted a scene that felt almost ordinary right up until it wasn’t: a group gathered outside a smoke shop, watching men shoot dice in the open, the kind of warm-weather sidewalk ritual that can draw a small crowd. Police and witnesses said Roque was observing when an argument broke out with one of the men in the group; in the middle of the street, the man produced a gun and fired. A witness described hearing many shots, and by the time the ambulance doors closed, the neighborhood understood something irreversible had happened.
His mother, returning home from buying groceries, saw the flashing lights before she understood why they were there. She ran toward the yellow tape, calling his phone again and again with no answer, reading the fear on neighbors’ faces as she pushed closer. When police told her the victim was her son, the moment became a collapse—grief spilling out onto the pavement where he’d just been lying. Those who spoke about him afterward described a kid with wide interests—baseball, cycling, art—someone who talked about college and engineering, someone who wanted to get his family away from the constant soundtrack of gunfire and conflict around their block.
Investigators recovered no weapon at the scene, but they did find evidence of how intense the burst of violence was: ten shell casings were reported in the immediate area. In the days after the shooting, police publicly said they had not made any arrests, even as the killing drew attention because of its proximity to a precinct house and the brazenness of a head shot on a busy corridor. Tips were sought through Crime Stoppers as detectives tried to reconstruct who was there, who argued with whom, and who pulled the trigger.
As the investigation continued, the NYPD released new images tied to the case and said two suspects were wanted in connection with the fatal shooting. The public-facing updates emphasized that the search was active and that, at the time of those releases, no arrest had been announced. The trail the shooters left behind, according to the information shared publicly, was mostly the cold residue of the moment—surveillance images, witness recollections, and the unanswered question of why a brief argument on a Bronx sidewalk ended with a life cut short.
