Boy, 16, fatally shot in Soho by gunman on Citi Bike was always ‘trying to help somebody’

The Queens teen fatally shot by a gunman on a Citi Bike in SoHo was described Wednesday as a helpful child who traveled each day from his Brooklyn home to his lower Manhattan charter school so he could have a better future.

It was 16-year-old Mahki Brown’s innate desire to help that led to him being shot in the courtyard of the luxury Dominick Hotel on Spring St. near Varick St. Tuesday afternoon, his family believes.

“He was always trying to help somebody,” said family friend LaKesha Jenkins, who had known Mahki since the teen was just 4. “He wasn’t a bad kid. He wasn’t disrespectful.”

Jenkins, 48, was among a group of neighbors who tried their best to console Mahki’s mother at her East Flatbush apartment Wednesday morning.

The teen’s mother was too grief-stricken to talk to reporters. Mahki was her only child, friends said.

Mahki had just left Broome Street Academy Charter High School and was hanging out with his friends at the nearby courtyard when he intervened in an argument between two groups of girls about 2:30 p.m., police said.

Another teen stepped in to defend a girl in the opposing group, pulled a gun and fired several shots, hitting Mahki once in the head and twice in the thigh.

The gunman and an accomplice took off on one Citi Bike and are still on the loose.

“He had a bullet in his head and his leg,” a man who witnessed the shooting told the Daily News Tuesday. “He was unconscious and not moving. They put him on a stretcher and did CPR.”

Medics rushed the wounded teen to Bellevue Hospital, where he died.

Jenkins said Mahki first went to high school in Queens but his mother moved him to the lower Manhattan charter school his sophomore year.

“He needed change,” Jenkins said. “He couldn’t be here in this area because it was this area that strayed him.”

After his mother switched him to the new school “the change came,” Jenkins said, making the hourlong commute each way worth it.

“You (saw) the growth,” Jenkins recalled. “He wanted better because he saw what his mom was doing for him. She was leading him to his future.”

News of Mahki’s death hit everyone in his apartment building “hard as a unit,” Jenkins said.

“We watched him grow up. He loved basketball,” she said. “His only problem is that he was always trying to help everybody. We have those people who have that type of heart.”

Mahki played basketball with Brooklyn youth groups, his coach Jessica Jenkins said as she fought back tears.

“He played since he was very little,” Jenkins, 32, said. “Mahki was his own favorite basketball player. He was passionate about the game. Sometimes you can see him frustrated in games. I’d calm him down.”

LaKesha Jenkins suspects the gunman is also a young boy.

“It was probably a child who did it,” she said. “The sad part about it is the person that did it, their parents don’t even know what they’re out here doing.”

As cops collect surveillance footage that could help them track the gunman’s movements, Mahki’s family and friends are hoping for a quick arrest.

“Who commanded (the gunman) to be God, to take someone’s life?” LaKesha Jenkins asked. “We are going to pray and we are hoping whoever did this gets caught.”

With Rocco Parascandola