One man shot, another stabbed in Bronx murders four minutes apart
Javan Jones (inset) was fatally shot in the back on E. 161st St. near Courtlandt Ave. in the Bronx on Sunday, May 24, 2026. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News)
One man was shot and another stabbed in a pair of slayings just four minutes apart in the Bronx, police said Monday.
The bloodshed began when 34-year-old Javan Jones was shot in the back on E. 161st St. near Courtlandt Ave. in Melrose at 9:36 p.m. Sunday, cops said.
“I got shot! It’s over,” Jones said in a call to his girlfriend, his cousin Jetaun White, 36, recounted to the Daily News.
“I guess he felt whatever happened happening,” the cousin said of the fatal shots.
Medics took Jones to Lincoln Hospital but he could not be saved.
Jones was sentenced to 10-and-a-half years in federal prison in 2013 for his role in the Courtland Ave. Crew, a gang that dealt crack cocaine and plotted violence against its rivals in the Bronx. He was released on federal probation in 2020.
His mother, Tieste Felder, said in a letter to the sentencing judge that the neighborhood he grew up in led him down a dangerous path.
“Javan is not and has never been a street thug. While he will fight back, he is not one to start trouble. He is not a malicious and evil person who sets out to hurt others. The area that we live in is rife with trouble,” she wrote, adding, “I can understand why Javan chose to surround himself with the protection of other people, because the truth is there is strength in numbers. Eventually someone would have killed him and all for no reason at all except for his address.”
The father of two was headed to a liquor store when he was killed, his cousin said. He then planned to return home to watch the reality show “Baddies” with his girlfriend, who is the mother of his 2-year-old son.
The shooting happened outside the officers of the Bronx Defenders, a non-profit providing legal defense to criminal suspects who can’t afford a private lawyer. The office was closed Sunday night.
Just four minutes later and about two miles away, a 29-year-old man was stabbed multiple times on West Farms Road near Rodman Place in West Farms.
Medics took him to St. Barnabas Hospital, where he died of his wounds, cops said. That victim’s name was not immediately released.
Police have made no arrests in either slaying.
Jones’ cousin said the victim recently had been working construction and doing deliveries, she said.
“He was just charismatic. He just has so much energy. He’s so full of life. He was funny,” White said. “He wasn’t no troublemaker. He made a lot of people laugh. He was a good person.”
She described him as her “favorite cousin.”
“I never heard anybody coming to me saying he did anything to them. He wasn’t that type of person,” White said. “I’m trying to think who would do this. It’s wild … I’m really shocked.”
Jones, who went by the nickname Capo, was living about a block away from the Melrose crime scene, his cousin said.
“I don’t understand what happened,” White said. “Somebody had to be probably hating on him or watching him, because this is not his energy. He don’t do that.”
The pair of killings came less than 24 hours after another Bronx murder: Jonathan Valentin, 29, was shot in the chest on Haviland Ave. near the Cross Bronx Expressway in Castle Hill about 12:15 a.m. Sunday.
Despite the Memorial Day weekend violence, murders and shootings in the Bronx have decreased this year, with 32 slayings and 78 shootings through May 17 compared to 37 killings and 88 shootings in the same time frame last year, NYPD stats show.
The Bronx accounted for for more than a third of the city’s 89 homicides this year through May 17, even though it accounts for roughly one-sixth of the city’s overall population.
Last Wednesday, Mayor Mamdani and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch split the Bronx into two separate patrol commands, Bronx North and Bronx South, to try to drive down crime rates. The borough will also get an additional 200 cops as part of the restructuring.
Except for Staten Island, every other borough in the city has long been split into two patrol commands.
