Metro

Pregnant woman fatally shot after her baby shower while trying to break up fight

A pregnant woman was fatally shot in the head after her baby shower in Harlem early Sunday when a fight broke out between her beau and ex and she futilely tried to play peacemaker, police and sources said. 

Shanice Young, 31 — who was eight months pregnant with her second child — was coming home from her shower and unloading presents when she found herself between the two feuding men shortly after 1 a.m. at West 128th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Manhattan, police said.

“She stepped in between to break it up and got caught in the middle,” an NYPD spokesman told The Post.  

Young was shot once in the head, allegedly by the ex-boyfriend, who was wearing a camouflage mask, police sources said.

Neighbors said Young was raising her little sister after her mom died of cancer last year and already has a 6-year-old daughter.

New York City Police Department Community Affairs Chaplin Robert Rice places a candle at a makeshift memorial near the scene of the shooting scene on September 12, 2021. G.N.Miller/NYPost

A friend who only gave her first name, Candice, said the expectant mom had just returned from her baby shower at a venue on 112th Street when she was killed. 

“They were unloading the stuff from the baby shower,” she said. “The gifts were lined up in the hallway, and she was going back outside when she got shot.

“I’m shaken up by it,” Candice said of Young’s slaying. “Who the f–k shoots a pregnant woman? You’ve got to be out of your mind.”Cops responding to a report of shots fired found Young on the ground between her double-parked car and another vehicle, the sources said. Police recovered three .40-caliber shell casings near the scene, sources and residents said. 

The super at Young’s building, Jose Morales, said he heard the shots and recalled seeing one cop trying frantically to save the victim’s life.

Candles were left at the area of the shooting. G.N.Miller/NYPost

“I saw them trying to resuscitate her, pumping her chest,” he said. “There was a police officer who was trying so hard to save her. He was pumping and pumping and wasn’t going to stop.

“When it was over, the officer was in the lobby with me, and he was just like, ‘I tried. I tried,’ ” Morales recalled. 

Young was rushed to Harlem Hospital but couldn’t be saved. It wasn’t immediately clear what the argument between the men was about, cops said.

The gunman remains on the loose. 

A card reading “End Gun Violence” was left at the scene of the shooting. G.N.Miller/NYPost

Meanwhile, around the same time, a 32-year-old man was fatally shot in the chest on the boardwalk along Rockaway Beach in Queens, police said.

Gerard Pounder was shot and killed at East 35th Street around 1 a.m. — whispering the name of the man who allegedly killed him just before dying, cops said. 

Police said Pounder was at a party under the boardwalk late Saturday and got into a dispute that turned deadly early Sunday.

Pounder, mortally wounded, stumbled up the steps to the boardwalk, where he collapsed, according to police. 

Cops interviewed his girlfriend at St. John’s Hospital, where Pounder was taken — and she told detectives that her boyfriend said the name of the man who shot him right before he died, according to police.