Yahoo News Investigation Into Fatal Shooting in SoHo Continues
Officials from the New York City Police Department are investigating a fatal shooting that took place early Tuesday morning on a SoHo street that is popular with designer and luxury shoppers.
Police officers responded to a 911 call at approximately 5:16 a.m. at 41 Greene Street outside of the Stone Island store. A 31-year-old man was found to be “unresponsive and unconscious,” having suffered a gunshot wound to the right thigh. EMS officials were called to the scene and the man was transported to NYC Health and Hospitals/Bellevue, where he was subsequently pronounced deceased, according to a NYPD spokesperson.
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The deceased was not initially identified by officials, pending notification of his family. He was later identified Tuesday night by the NYPD as Javier Osorio-Mejia, a popular sneaker reseller, who was known as “Upscale Cracc.” The Bayonne, N.J. resident owned the downtown Manhattan resale sneaker store Vault 134, which started out on Orchard Street and is now located on East Houston Street. Osorio-Mejia graduated from William Patterson University with a focus on information technology, according to his LinkedIn page. Prior to launching Vault 134, he worked for Amazon as an area operations manager.
In a post on “X” Tuesday, Complex Sneakers described him as “a mainstay at sneaker releases in New York City for years. If there was a lineup happening Cracc was there.”
By his own account, Osorio-Mejia once wrote, “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.”
No arrests had been made as of Tuesday night and the investigation is ongoing, according to a NYPD spokesperson. “An unknown number of people fled in a black sedan,” according to the spokesperson.
Tuesday’s early-morning incident occurred hours before the neighborhood’s numerous stores, restaurants, businesses and residents are up-and-running. Despite that, several retailers did not open Tuesday, as police investigated the incident and cordoned off select areas with yellow crime scene tape.
A stretch of Greene Street that houses stores for Frame Denim, Staud and Theory remained shuttered Tuesday afternoon, according to an employee at the Frame Denim store, who declined further comment. Calls to Staud‘s and Theory’s Greene Street locations were unanswered, and media requests to all three companies were not immediately acknowledged. In addition, two spokespeople for Stone Island had not acknowledged a media request Tuesday afternoon.
A NYPD spokesperson did not respond to a query asking if Tuesday’s shooting was a botched robbery, as reported by a few outlets.
Asked to compare the foot traffic in his neighborhood to a typical Tuesday, Brandon Zwagerman, deputy director of the SoHo Broadway Initiative, the business improvement district that oversees the Broadway corridor but not Greene Street, said via email, “Nothing looks particularly different here — bustling as [it would be on] a usual summer weekday.”
Retail occupancy is well above pre-COVID-19 levels in SoHo with Cartier, Dior, Acne Studios, Givenchy and The Webster among the tenants on Greene Street. The district had a 84 percent occupancy rate at the end of last last year, which marked a seven percent increase compared to 2022. Commercial rents are also on the rise in the area with the average rent on Prince Street in the first quarter of this year registering $1,073 per square foot — well above the Manhattan average of $688 per square foot, according to CBRE.
Tuesday’s early-morning shooting was the second fatal one in SoHo in the past six weeks. In early May, a 16-year-old boy was shot and killed at 2:30 p.m. in a public courtyard on Spring Street between Varick Street and Sixth Avenue.
Editor’s Note: This article was updated on June 26 at 12:25 a.m.
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