Inside NYC’s deadliest police precinct where fruit vendor was beaten to death, innocent dad gunned down: ‘If you bump into someone, they want to kill you’

A hardworking fruit stand seller so savagely beaten that his family needed to cover his bashed-in head with a fedora at his funeral.

An innocent 29-year-old dad excited for his daughter’s upcoming third birthday murdered by a vicious gangbanger.

An autistic, obsessive compulsive man bleeding out in his lobby after inadvertently moving his killer’s backpack.

These were some of the crimes in the NYPD’s deadliest precinct in 2024 — the Bronx’s 46th Precinct — which saw 27 homicides and 65 people shot, leaving cops calling for more resources and locals afraid to walk the blood-soaked streets.

The precinct — which oversees troubled neighborhoods Fordham, University Heights, Morris Heights and Mount Hope — faced a staggering 107.7% surge in homicides and bumps in other major crimes from the previous year, according to NYPD data.

“If you bump into someone, they want to kill you,” said Ronaysi Gomez, 25, whose innocent bystander brother, Ronald Gomez-Mesa, 29, was fatally stabbed in Morris Heights on July 2.

“Right now we don’t have any safety. We don’t know when we are ever getting home safe because right now everything is crazy.

“This is just horrible,” she said about the skyrocketing murder rate.

“How can we live this way? This is not what we want to live with.”

Gomez’s fears are punctuated by surging crime in the area covered by the 46th station house.

In the precinct, major crimes were up in every category — murder (107.7%), rape (54.5%), robbery (9.1%), felony assault (10.9%), burglary (28.9%) and grand larceny (21.2%) — except grand larceny auto, according to the NYPD data.

Bullets flew, with some 65 victims shot in 50 incidents of gunplay.

Lower crime rates in other parts of the Big Apple has done little to soothe the Gomez family’s fear and grief.

“I’ve been hearing that the crime rate is going down, but I haven’t been seeing it,” the younger sister told The Post after the heartbroken, tight-knit family spent the holidays without Ronald — who lived with his parents, Ronaysi and her kids.

Months earlier, Ronald Gomez-Mesa was seated outside the Jason Deli and Grocery on West Tremont Avenue and Phelan Place when a woman and man got into a fender bender, according to sources.

The woman then called Clement Boateng, an alleged member of the River Park Towers gang who had four past arrests, including one for gun possession from Sept. 22, 2016, sources told The Post.

Boateng, 35, showed up and randomly attacked unsuspecting witnesses after a man chucked something at him and drove off, wild surveillance video showed.

An enraged Boateng then lunged at two men nearby, including Gomez-Mesa.

The victim fought back before Boateng allegedly plunged a knife into his chest.

Just a week before Gomez-Mesa was killed, he passed his TLC driver’s license exam — and hoped to use it to provide for his daughter Rosalia, who was set to turn 3-years old a few weeks later. 

“He couldn’t even enjoy spending her birthday with him,” Ronaysi said, adding the murder has crushed her mother. 

A mile and a half away, fruit vendor Leslie Sanchez, 56, was beaten to death with a baseball bat during an unprovoked attack while working at his selling spot on East Fordham Road near the Grand Concourse on Sept. 12. 

Sanchez, a father of two, was left so badly battered that his family said they placed a fedora on his head in the casket to hide the bruising.

His heartbroken widow, Maciel Vasquez, called his killing an “injustice.”

“My husband was a good man. He wasn’t a problematic person,” she told The Post after police arrested her husband’s accused attackers, both of whom had prior arrests. 

“I am asking the police and the governor to please do their job,” she begged.

Law enforcement experts and Bronx cops who spoke with The Post blamed the high crime rates on bail reform, cops fleeing the department in recent years and a lack of patrolling. 

“It’s an impoverished area so we are just depleted,” Michael Alcazar, a former NYPD detective and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told The Post. “We just can’t saturate areas with law enforcement when we normally could.

“If we don’t have police officers, then crime will just spike,” he added.

A Bronx cop said some nights only two or three cars patrol the entire vast precinct.  

“There are no cops to patrol the precinct,” he said.

“The criminals know there are no cops riding around so they don’t have a problem carrying guns.”

Councilman Oswald Feliz (D-Bronx), whose part of the district overlaps the 46th, called for more police in a September letter to then-interim police commissioner Tom Donlon.

He argued parts of the Bronx were “left behind” as violence soared. 

“Those aren’t just numbers; they also represent families traumatized by the horrors of violence,” Felix told The Post.

“We need more cops in these communities, and must also think about laws that are allowing individuals to terrorize our communities this way.”

Last month, Mayor Eric Adams announced a pilot program dubbed “Every Block Counts,” which directs multi-agency resources to specific streets in Brooklyn’s 73rd Precinct and the Bronx’s 46th, which saw the most amount of shootings citywide. 

The administration said not a single shooting or shots fired incident happened along three Bronx’s thoroughfares — Morris Avenue, Elm Place and Walton Avenue — since the launch of the program in October. That compared to four shootings and shots fired incidents in 2023, according to the city.

One Bronx cop said the program, like others in the past, will do little to change out of control violence committed by gangbangers.

“This place has been ridden with crime for over 30 years. Politicians have been promising to provide services forever,” he railed. 

“Same story, everyone makes promises and nothing happens.”

A spokesperson for the NYPD said cops perform “enhanced patrols” in high crimes areas in the precinct through “precision policing.”

“In the 46th precinct, the NYPD has identified specific crime reduction zones where officers perform enhanced patrols in higher crime areas to root out violence and disorder,” the spokesperson said.

“The NYPD is also taking alleged assailants off the streets, and has made 29 homicide arrests in the 46 — an increase of 163.6% — while overall arrests are up 19.4%.”

Despite the arrests, the mayhem has locals feeling rattled.

“[It’s] really, really bad,” said Gabby Almonte, who was visiting her mom in Mount Hope. 

“Because you be walking and you don’t know if you’re going to get home.”

Additional reporting by Dorian Geiger and Craig McCarthy