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Two teenage girls were stabbed — one of them fatally — during a parade celebrating the Mount Vernon High School basketball team’s state championship season on Friday, police said.
What began as a city-wide celebration turned to tragedy at around 3:55 p.m. when cops found the two stabbed teens and multiple women fighting near the end of the parade route, according to a statement from the city.
One of the girls suffered non-life threatening injuries while the other victim, a 16-year-old, was “gravely injured” and died as she was being rushed to Jacobi Medical Center.
“I am devastated and completely outraged,” Mayor Shawyn Patterson Howard said in a statement.
“We began our day celebrating the greatness and success of our youth and we ended it with a young life that has been taken by senseless and inexcusable violence,” Howard said. “The mental emotional and spiritual health of our community especially of our children must be the priority and we must come together.”
The parade kicked off around 11 a.m. with members of the Mount Vernon Knights’ undefeated team snaking through the city in a police-escorted motorcade, passing by 15 other schools city schools before ending at Mount Vernon City Hall for a ceremony where the team was honored for its 12th state title.
But a fight broke out between two 10th-graders from Mount Vernon High School and two other students from the Mount Vernon STEAM Academy and the Denzel Washington School, Mount Vernon Superintendent Kenneth Hamilton wrote in a message to the school community obtained by Patch. It’s not clear which schools the victims attended.
The Mount Vernon School District is offering counseling services at Mount Vernon High School on Saturday, Sunday and Monday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m, officials said. Additional community-based, individual and group counseling will be available through Family Services of Westchester on Saturday, from noon to 3 p.m.
Anyone with information regarding the incident is encouraged to contact the Mount Vernon Detective Division.
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