NY man allegedly kills mom after she tells him to get job

Mother of eight Fatoumata Danson was shot inside her East Harlem apartment, allegedly by her 22-year-old son.

A New York City man has been arrested and charged with the murder of his own mother this week after she reportedly told him to get a job. 

Musa Camara, 22, allegedly shot his mother, Fatoumata Danson, in the head inside their apartment at the Lehman Village Houses in East Harlem. New York City police confirmed to NBC4 that the man was arrested just a half a block away from the crime scene, and he was in possession of the murder weapon. 

Mother of eight Fatoumata Danson (above) was shot in the head inside the family apartment in East Harlem, allegedly by one of her children, 22-year-old Musa Camara. (NBC4)

Danson, 39, was the mother of seven other children. Members of her family — which hails from Gambia and Sierra Leone, immigrants to the United States in the 1990s — were observed grieving outside their building. 

According to her distraught brother, Yaku Basangari, Danson was a kind woman who “always smiled and laughed.”

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Basangari is calling for his nephew to “rot in jail for the rest of his life” for the crime of killing his own mother. 

He said the shooting was because Camara is “a lazy bastard … and my sister told him to get a job, threw him out of the house … and this was his reaction.”

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Camara was seen in a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation after his arrest. He was charged with murder Wednesday, according to authorities. 

Matricide is a rare crime in the U.S.; less than 2 percent of all homicides are the murder of a mother by her biological child. However, the data does note that most matricides are committed by adult sons. 

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Despite an ongoing pandemic, violent crime in New York City surged in 2020, where more than 447 people were the victims of homicide last year. That was a 40 percent increase over the previous year.

“I can’t imagine a darker period,” Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said in a year-end department briefing with reporters.  

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The increase should alarm already-anxious Americans, some contend.

“It’s clearly related, in part, to the coronavirus and to the fact that people are cooped up,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at the start of 2021. “And it’s certainly related to the fact that the criminal justice system is on pause, and that’s causing a lot of problems.”

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