The father of a 7-month-old slain by a stranger’s bullet in Brooklyn claimed he had been trying to turn his life around when his infant was killed, he said in a letter Saturday.
Baby Kaori Patterson-Moore was fatally struck by a stray bullet at Humboldt Street and Moore Street in Bushwick on Wednesday, when a man fired a gun from the back of a moped as her parents pushed the tot and her 2-year-old brother in a stroller.
Police believe Kaori’s dad, Jamari Patterson, was the intended target.
“I wanted to spend my entire life being her father,” he wrote in a letter released to the media after a community vigil Saturday afternoon.
“When they put my baby in the incubator because she was premature, I couldn’t wait to take her home and just have her with me hugging and loving her forever.”
He wrote of having graduated from a program and changing his life after his daughter’s birth.
“Upon graduating, I ended up having my beautiful baby girl, seeing her for the first time I knew she was special,” the letter reads.
When he finally got to take her home, he “made sure her and her mom and her brother all stayed with me and vowed I changed my life for them through music,” the letter continued. “The life I live, even getting different jobs to stay away from negativity, I begin to change things up. Which is facts.”
The shooting has been devastating, he wrote.
“I really don’t understand,” he said. “I was literally taking her outside to get her ears pierced, new clothes and shoes for her and her brother. I just taught my baby how to take a step. She took her first step to me, her only step. I can no longer sing to my baby, or nothing.”
“I miss her so much. I want my baby back.”
The letter came as Kaori’s relatives gathered with a crowd of about 50 mourners Saturday afternoon in a vigil to mourn the baby.
“We are hurt,” great-grandmother Arlene Poitier told the gathering. “We have anger. My family is broken. I am broken. I don’t have her to sleep with me at night.
“The parents would bring her in my room every night to go to sleep and she would be asleep until they closed the door and once the door was closed she would open her eyes and look at me,” the grieving grandma said.
“She’s not there,” she continued, choking up. “I still have her diapers, her pajamas, and stuff on my pillow. She was Nana’s baby. She’s Nana’s baby.”
Poitier’s grandson has been asking her why the baby was killed.
“I have to hear my grandson say, ‘What did she do that someone would do this?’” Poitier recalled.
“What am I supposed to say? What am I supposed to say when children ask you stuff like this?”
The bullet that hit the baby also grazed her 2-year-old brother’s back, cops said.
New York Attorney General Letitia James attended the vigil and thanked the NYPD.
“I want to thank them in particular for hunting down these two individuals who are responsible for the murder of a 7-month-old child,” James said.
She sent a message to the Brooklyn District Attorney asking that “these two individuals be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. No excuses,” she said.
Alleged triggerman Amuri Greene, 21, was taken to a hospital for a possible broken leg suffered when the moped crashed after the shooting and was charged with murder, attempted murder, assault, and other counts.
His alleged accomplice, moped-driver Matthew Rodriguez, 18, was arrested in Pennsylvania Friday and charges against him were pending, cops said.
Detectives believe the gunman was aiming Patterson, who allegedly had ties to the Money Over Everything gang in Bushwick Houses NYCHA development, cops said.
The baby was “an angel, always smiling, always a beautiful individual,” grandmother Christine Poitier told the mourners.
“This should have never happened,” she said. “There should’ve been no shooting where a baby is being killed as an innocent bystander.”
Kaori’s grandmom blamed adults for failing to raise their kids right.
“Somewhere through the generation we failed,” Poitier said. “A lot of these young kids, they don’t know, they don’t know. They don’t have the morals, they don’t have the principles. Some of them don’t have their grandmother outside telling them, ‘You can’t do this.’”
