A 17-year-old boy set to graduate from high school in only a few days was stabbed to death Friday night in the Bronx.
Carl Ducasse left his Mount Hope home shortly after dinner and had planned to get a milkshake with his friend when he was approached by two men near the corner of Walton Avenue and 175th Street. That friend told detectives that the men appeared to be from a nearby homeless shelter and demanded two dollars from them. Neither boy had any cash.
At that point, ABC reports, one man tapped Ducasse's pocket and reportedly heard a jingle. Ducasse assured it was only his keys, but moments later a second man pulled out a knife and stabbed him in the chest.
“They were patting him down and trying to see if he did have money,” Narier Ducasse, the boy's cousin, told the Times. “His cellphone dropped. Once his cell phone dropped, he went to go pick it up, and the other guy stabbed him.”
The teenager began to collapse on the sidewalk as his friend ran back to his family's apartment for help. EMS workers rushed Ducasse to nearby Saint Barnabus Hospital, but he could not be saved.
The Times notes that the boy was the youngest of three children, born to parents who had moved to New York from the Dominican Republic in search of a better life. No arrests have been made in the case, and Ducasse's killer remains at large, police said.
"I fight with him ’cause I never wanted him to go outside. He went five minutes and he’s gone,” the boy's mother told CBS. “For $2, he took his life."
