Police arrested a man Tuesday charged with killing an up-and-coming YouTube sports commentator who was struck by a bullet meant for someone else in a Harlem drive-by shooting in July.
“I didn’t do sh**!” Mohamed Sawaneh, 21, shouted to reporters as police walked him from the 28th Precinct to a police vehicle around 5:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Sawaneh was charged with murder and criminal possession of a firearm for allegedly firing the shots that killed Jeremy “Jeremiah” Cummings, 37, as he talked with friends on July 2 around 1:35 p.m. near W. 118th St. and Frederick Douglass Blvd.
Surveillance video obtained by the Daily News shows Cummings talking with at least three men on the street near the sidewalk as a white Honda sedan slowly drives by, and someone inside the vehicle fires off shots.
The men scatter and Cummings, who fell to the ground, starts to crawl around a nearby parked car, a bullet wound in his back. He briefly stands up, staggers to the sidewalk and collapses, the video shows.
Cummings was “an unintended target,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said at a press conference at the time.
After firing the shots that killed Cummings, Sawaneh sped off in the white Honda only to slam into the back of a van at a red light, cops said.
“The van refuses to move, so the car reverses down the street but gets boxed in,” Kenny said, describing the killer’s wild escape.
“He abandons the car, runs off on foot, and goes to Lenox Ave. where he robs two teens of their CitiBike at gunpoint and flees the scene.”
Sawaneh, who lives in the Bronx, was arrested after a month-long investigation.
“Someone he was chilling with was being targeted and he was hit with a stray bullet,” Cummings’ brother Andre told The News in July. “He didn’t deserve that.”
Cummings’ YouTube channel “JermSportsTV” — where he posted professional sports clips, and local street games he filmed, edited and uploaded — had just started to take off before he was killed.
In the two weeks before his death, Cummings’ follower count grew to more than 33,000 users after he posted a video about two WNBA players, one of them Angel Reese, who had recently made the roster of the league’s All-Star Game.
“It just shot up in a couple weeks. Overnight, for real. He posted two WNBA players, girl players. That got him views, and overnight his subscribers skyrocketed,” his brother said. “It was crazy. It was just crazy. One day we checked and we were like, whoa, out of nowhere. It would be like 300 subscribers, overnight it went up 10,000.”
“Couldn’t believe it. That’s when he said, ‘I got to take this serious’,” he said.
His brother said he had spoken to Cummings about two hours before the shooting, and all seemed well. Then he got the call from a friend that Cummings had been shot.
“I was really crying. It hurt me,” he said.
