A 15-year-old boy was busted by police for allegedly gunning down a store clerk who caught him and a friend shoplifting – but only after cops say the boy lied to his mother about a coat left behind at the scene by claiming the clerk had stolen it.
The outraged mother unwittingly turned her son into police by dragging him to the 120th Precinct to get the coat back, police said.
Cops say the teen was trying to shoplift some snack cakes with a friend at a bodega on Staten Island early yesterday morning when the clerk, 18-year-old Sharif Fased, chased them out of the store.
As Fased stood in front of his uncle’s bodega, the suspected teen thief pulled a .380-automatic pistol from his jacket, threw the coat on the ground and opened fire, hitting Fased twice in the chest. The clerk was pronounced dead at the scene.
Two others, a store employee and a customer, sustained minor injuries.
The teen, whose identity was withheld because he’s a minor, ran home to his mother, who wanted to know where his coat was, police said.
He told her it was stolen by Fased after the clerk accused the teen of shoplifting, police said.
Angered, the mother dragged her son to the local station house, where cops quickly put two and two together and charged the 15-year-old with the shooting.
Fased, who worked nights to help out his uncle, was a senior at Port Richmond HS, and planned to go to college and study computers, his family told The Post.
“He was a very nice kid,” said Fased’s cousin, Abdulla Wasil. “All the neighbors liked him. They are all crying because they know he was a very nice kid.”
Wasil said his cousin was a devout Muslim who regularly attended mosque services at nearby Noor Al-Islam temple.
The victim’s mother is living in Yemen, but the family has decided to bury him in the United States, where he was born.
The teen suspect, who could be charged as an adult, is in police custody while the district attorney’s office decides whether to charge the teen with murder.