BY SAM SPOKONY | Police have arrested a suspect in the fatal shooting of a man at Smith Houses on Nov. 10.
Christopher Delrosario, 19, was apprehended last week in the upstate town of Port Jervis, .N.Y, according to police. He was arraigned on Nov. 15 and charged with second degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.
Although he apparently fled upstate after the shooting, Delrosario is a resident of 46 Madison St. (a Smith Houses building), police said.
Prosecutors say Delrosario shot George Taliferro, 30, in the Smith Houses courtyard around 4 a.m. on Nov. 10, on a walkway between the NYCHA development’s buildings at 7 and 15 St. James Pl.
Four shots were fired that morning, and Taliferro was struck with three bullets in the torso, according to court documents. He was found by police at the scene minutes later, and was pronounced dead shortly after being rushed to New York Presbyterian /Lower Manhattan Hospital.
After his death, police listed Taliferro’s address as 388 Pearl St., another building within the New York City Housing Authority development. But according to neighboring residents who said they knew Taliferro for many years, he actually lived at a NYCHA development in Brooklyn, although his parents, grandparents and three young children lived in Smith Houses in Chinatown.
The fact that Taliferro lived in Brooklyn public housing led some of his former friends to believe that he had gotten caught up in a larger, drug-related “turf war” between Lower East Side NYCHA residents and those living in and around NYCHA developments in East Flatbush.
“It was definitely turf related,” said a 60-year-old woman who has lived at Smith Houses for 35 years, and who said she knew Taliferro and his family ever since he was a child. “[Taliferro] sold marijuana but he didn’t bother nobody, and he just got caught up in a bigger war. He was a good guy.”
