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The
boy, Rashaun Weaver, was taken into custody without incident on
Friday night, police said, following the arrest in December of a
13-year-old boy in connection with the murder of Tessa Majors,
18, a student at Barnard College.
"This arrest is a major milestone on the path to justice for
Tessa Majors," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said at a
news conference. "And our journey to reach that milestone today
was not a sprint, but rather it was a painstaking, deliberate
and meticulous search for the truth."
Weaver is scheduled to be arraigned on Wednesday on charges of
murder and robbery.
Majors was stabbed multiple times on the evening of Dec. 11
while walking through Harlem's Morningside Park near her school.
After staggering to a nearby school security booth, she was
rushed to a hospital and declared dead.
Majors, who was from Charlottesville, Virginia, was a freshman
at the all-women college.
At the time, police said there were as many as three attackers.
New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison
said at the briefing that the investigation "is still ongoing."
Unlike the 13-year-old, whose case is being prosecuted in family
court, Vance said Weaver is being charged in criminal court as
an adult.
The highly publicized murder was one of 318 New York City
homicides in 2019, a 7.8% jump from 2018, according to police.
Despite the increase, the number of homicides was less than half
its 2000 level, and the overall rate of major felony crimes last
year continued a decades-long downtrend.
(Reporting by Peter Szekely; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
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