Bronx, NY — After immigrating from Ghana last year, Javits had reportedly been bullied in school before his shooting Thursday. Ghanaian and African diaspora community members gathered in mourning on Saturday.

Andre Easton, public school teacher, father of three, and congressional candidate for NY-15, released the following statement on November 1st:

“Justice for Javits Frimpong.

“Javits Frimpong was 15 years old, a high school student in the Bronx. On Thursday morning he was shot and killed in broad daylight near Crotona Park, on his way to school.

“I stand with Javits' family and with the Bronx's Ghanaian and African diaspora communities as we mourn him. Javits came from Ghana just one year ago to join his father, who brought him here hoping for a better life. His father says Javits had reported being bullied at school, and that the principal suspended two students just days before he was killed.

“As a father of three young boys and a Bronx public school teacher for 13 years, I am shaken to my core. Javits could have been a student of mine. Javits could have been my child.

“Yesterday, I attended a community press conference at East 171st Street and Crotona Place, steps from where Javits was shot. Listening to community leaders, and talking with Ghanaian neighbors afterward, I heard a message that I could relate to: our communities are tired of sympathy and apologies. All too often, Black children are deprived of the right to grow old. Such serious tragedies demand equally serious action.

“Here in the Bronx, that action is urgent. Even as citywide shootings have fallen to record lows, the Bronx accounted for more than a third of the city's shootings last year.

“When it comes to ending gun violence in our communities, we know what works. After violence interruption programs launched in the South Bronx, the number of people shot there fell by 63 percent. The city comptroller estimates these programs may have prevented 1,567 shootings citywide between 2012 and 2024.

“Yet Javits' death exposes how little our government invests in the solutions actually proven to stop violence. Violence interrupters still reach fewer than half of the city's 77 police precincts.

“And last year, the Trump administration canceled $811 million in Justice Department grants, including more than $66 million from the main federal fund for community violence intervention.

“We also know that to adequately address the crisis of gun violence, we must tackle its causes at the root. To have truly safe streets, we need strong schools and stable communities. We have the resources to make that a reality. In fact, Bronx workers produce billions in wealth every single year for the richest city in the richest country in the world.

“Instead of that wealth going to line the pockets of a handful of billionaires who keep taking a bigger share, we could make housing a human right in a city where more than 154,000 public school students, a record, experienced homelessness in a single school year.

“We could fully fund our schools and afterschool programs to give every child robust services that meet their social and psychological needs as they grow. We could guarantee free, universal healthcare so families can get mental health care in their own neighborhoods. Instead, Washington passed a law that hands ICE $75 billion of our tax dollars while cutting an estimated $1 trillion from Medicaid. No congressional district in America has more people on Medicaid than ours, right here in NY-15 in the Bronx.

“Yesterday's community gathering also exposed a problem that has gone unaddressed for too long: anti-immigrant hostility toward the Bronx's Ghanaian community. Parents described how bullying keeps their children from focusing in school. A restaurant owner told us her business has been vandalized again and again in racist attacks.

“We know who created this hostility. In his first term, Donald Trump evoked this nation’s long history of white supremacy when he called African nations "shithole countries." In his second, his administration has poured billions of dollars into a racist campaign scapegoating immigrants, leaving death and destruction from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, from Springfield, Ohio, to New York.

“In our own borough, ICE agents are kidnapping our neighbors and opening fire on our streets. Last month in Marble Hill, an ICE officer shot Oscar Belgal, a Bronx father, in his car while his 5-year-old son sat in the back seat. That campaign, together with the deliberate underfunding of communities like ours, has fed the hostility Ghanaian families described to me.

“But Trump is not the only one responsible. The billionaires profit when our communities are divided and our labor is easier to exploit, and our entire political establishment, including the Democratic Party, ultimately serves the billionaire agenda. Twice in the past two decades, Democrats held the White House and both houses of Congress, and twice they failed to deliver the comprehensive immigration reform they had long promised. For 20 years, Democrats have voted with Republicans to fund ICE, building the mass deportation machine we see today.

“Can we really trust politicians like Ritchie Torres, who has taken money from the same billionaires and lobbyists who back Trump and the Republican Party, to meet this moment and fight for the transformative change we need?

“What we need goes beyond one person or one election. We need a mass movement powerful enough to win a new system, one where working people hold the political and economic power to direct our resources toward the needs of people and the planet.

“The Bronx is ready for socialism.”