Investigations into fatal shooting in SoHo continue

New York Police Department officials are investigating a fatal shooting that occurred early Tuesday morning on a SoHo street popular with designer and luxury shoppers.

Police officers responded to a 911 call at approximately 5:16 a.m. at 41 Greene Street in front of the Stone Island store. A 31-year-old man was found “unresponsive and unconscious” with a gunshot wound to the right thigh. Emergency personnel were called to the scene and the man was transported to NYC Health and Hospitals/Bellevue, where he was pronounced dead, according to an NYPD spokesperson.

The deceased was not initially identified by officials because his family has not yet been notified. He was later identified by the NYPD on Tuesday evening as Javier Osorio-Mejia, a popular sneaker reseller who was known as “Upscale Cracc.” The Bayonne, NJ-based owner of the Downtown Manhattan sneaker resale store Vault 134, which started on Orchard Street and is now located on East Houston Street. Osorio-Mejia graduated from William Patterson University with a major in information technology, according to his LinkedIn page. Before founding Vault 134, he worked as an area operations manager for Amazon.

In a post on “X” Tuesday, Complex Sneakers described him as “a fixture at sneaker releases in New York City for years. If there was a lineup, Cracc was there.”

Osorio-Mejia himself once wrote: “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.”

According to an NYPD spokesman, no arrests had been made as of Tuesday evening and the investigation is ongoing. “An unknown number of people fled in a black sedan,” the spokesman said.

The incident early Tuesday morning occurred hours before the neighborhood’s many shops, restaurants, businesses and residents were set to reopen. Despite this, several businesses did not open Tuesday as police investigated the incident and cordoned off select areas with yellow tape.

A section of Greene Street that includes Frame Denim, Staud and Theory stores remained closed Tuesday afternoon, according to an employee at the Frame Denim store, who declined further comment. Calls to Staud’s and Theory’s on Greene Street went unanswered, and media inquiries to all three companies were not immediately acknowledged. In addition, two Stone Island spokespeople had not acknowledged a media inquiry Tuesday afternoon.

A spokesman for the New York Police Department did not respond to a question about whether Tuesday’s shooting was a botched robbery, as some media reported.

When asked what foot traffic levels are in his neighborhood on 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 – responded by email: “Nothing looks particularly different here – it’s as busy as a normal summer weekday.”

Retail occupancy in SoHo is well above pre-COVID-19 levels. Tenants on Greene Street include Cartier, Dior, Acne Studios, Givenchy and The Webster. The district had an occupancy rate of 84 percent at the end of last year, up seven percent from 2022. Commercial rents in the area are also rising. According to CBRE, the average rent on Prince Street was $1,073 per square foot in the first quarter of this year – well above the Manhattan average of $688 per square foot.

The early morning shooting on Tuesday 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 00:25