Officer Won’t Be Charged in Fatal Shooting of Boy Who Had Pellet Gun

The New York attorney general’s office said on Wednesday that it would not file charges against a police officer who fatally shot a 13-year-old boy in Utica, N.Y., because it did not believe the evidence would convince a jury that the officer’s use of force was unjustified.

The killing of the boy, Nyah Mway, sparked outrage last year in Utica, particularly among its community of Karen refugees from Myanmar, a group to which Nyah belonged. Refugee families make up roughly one-quarter of Utica’s population of 60,000, and more than half of those refugees are Karen.

On the evening of June 28, three officers — Bryce Patterson, Patrick Husnay and Andrew Citriniti — approached Nyah and a friend because they matched the physical description of teenagers wanted in connection with a series of armed robberies in the area, prosecutors said.

The police began to question the boys, but Nyah ran away when an officer asked if he could pat him down to search for weapons, according to a report released on Wednesday by the attorney general’s Office of Special Investigation.

Officer Patterson followed Nyah, who pulled what appeared to be a black handgun out of his coat and pointed it at the officer’s chest, the report said. The officer tackled the boy, sending them both crashing onto the sidewalk, although Nyah did not loosen his grip on the weapon.

As the boy lay on the sidewalk, Officer Husnay “leaned over and fired a single shot into Nyah Mway’s chest at close range,” the report said. He was taken to a nearby hospital and pronounced dead.