EUGENE T. TURNEY

A police report describes 17-year-old Yeremi Colina as the victim of a deadly stabbing this month. His mother long had another way of describing him: “leader of the pack.”

Yeremi was the oldest of six siblings and the reason, his mother Beritza Colina said, they were all able to make the arduous journey from their native Venezuela to the United States last year.

“It took us almost six months,” she recalled in Spanish in an interview on Friday. “In every country, we worked. Either Yeremi or I would do whatever we could. … We sold things in the streets. We slept in cardboard boxes on the sidewalk.”

The family spent six days crossing the treacherous Darien Gap, and Beritza was pregnant at the time, she said. On one occasion, she said, Yeremi saved his then-9-year-old brother from drowning in a river.

“God gave him the strength,” she said of her oldest son. “Things happened to us in the jungle that we still don’t talk about.”

On Dec. 4, 2023, the family members reached Texas, were bused to New York City and were given two rooms at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, which has been serving as a migrant intake center since the spring of last year. But a year and a day later, police say, Yeremi was stabbed to death on a street in Lower Manhattan.

His dreams of becoming a professional soccer player were cut short.

NYPD officials on Monday said they were still looking for suspects in Colina’s killing, describing them as three men in their 20s. Police have not yet announced any arrests or the identities of any suspects, though they did release surveillance footage of the men they’re seeking.

Murders are relatively rare in the 1st NYPD Precinct where Colina was killed, with four happening so far this year through Dec. 8, compared to none last year in the same period, according to department data.

Police initially said Colina, 17, and an 18-year-old male were on John Street near the Fulton Street subway stop in the Financial District around 7:40 p.m. on Dec. 5 when they encountered the three men. The groups started fighting, and one of the men stabbed the two teens after asking them if they spoke English, police said.

But Mayor Eric Adams walked back that description at a news conference last week, saying the part about the men asking whether the teens spoke English “wasn’t in any documentation or any of the interviews” for the case. Police have not been investigating the incident as a hate crime.

Some media outlets also reported that detectives were looking into the possibility that the violence was related to a rivalry between Tren de Aragua, a notorious gang from Venezuela, and a Dominican gang. But Beritza Colina said her son was absolutely not a gang member, adding that the reports have caused revenge threats to circulate back in their home country, endangering some of her family members who stayed behind.

“Yeremi only left home to go to school, he went out to play soccer,” she said. “They [police] have an obsession [with Tren de Aragua]. Not every case can be related to that.”

Carlos Nieves, assistant commissioner at the NYPD, on Monday told Gothamist that police were exploring potential gang involvement because “known gang members” had posted on social media about taking revenge following the incident. But he said Colina had no criminal history in New York and there was no other indication the teen was ever involved in Tren de Aragua.

“The gang angle is an avenue we’re looking at. If our investigation is going the other way, we stay away from the gang avenue,” he said.

Nieves also said Tren de Aragua “activity” at the Roosevelt Hotel — largely migrants committing robberies — has “toned down a lot” because many of the suspects were arrested.

On the day Colina was killed, he took his siblings to school and then returned to the hotel to have breakfast with his mother, she recalled. He was previously a student at Maxine Greene High School for Imaginative Inquiry on the Upper West Side, but was in the process of switching schools because another student was bullying him, Beritza Colina said.

Yeremi met that afternoon with a social worker who was going to help him make the switch, she said.

“After that, he spent about an hour with me,” she noted, “and then he went out and said, ‘Mom, I’m going to eat with my friends.’”

One of Yeremi’s friends — the 18-year-old who was stabbed and injured in the same altercation — lived at a migrant shelter near the Fulton Street station, Beritza said. She added that the two friends came across the alleged assailants as Yeremi was about to hop on a train to come home.

NYPD officials and Beritza Colina generally align about what happened next: The men flashed what they called possible gang signs and the teens approached them. Yeremi Colina was holding some sort of stick that he had picked up on the streets, his mother said.

Nieves said Colina had an unspecified “object” in his hand that he tried using for self-defense. A verbal argument between the groups escalated into a fist fight, which turned deadly when one of the men pulled out a knife.

Colina was stabbed in the chest before running down the street and collapsing, police and his mother said. NYPD officials said the knife was still lodged in his body when they arrived at the scene, and his mother said her son’s body was still warm when she finally arrived at Bellevue Hospital to see him hours later.

“I stayed with him for a long time, begging him to wake up,” she said. “I kept coming back. … Eventually they told me, ‘Señora, your son lost his life.’”

“The boys only committed an imprudence in giving those guys the time of day, in stopping to argue with them and starting to fight with them,” she continued. “It just so happened that they were armed, and hurt one and killed the other.”

On the busy sidewalk in front of the Roosevelt Hotel on two recent mornings, Yeremi Colina’s death was just a passing point of discussion for many of the migrants who spoke to Gothamist about the case. But on social media, his close friends called for justice, posting pictures of him edited to include angel wings, and reupping old videos of their times together. Like his mother did, several of them denied Colina had any connections to gang activity in messages to Gothamist.

Beritza Colina said NYPD detectives have been communicative and helpful so far, and have promised a thorough investigation.

During the day, she continues to watch videos of her son on her phone — of him scoring a soccer goal from almost halfway across the field; of him taking his siblings to school; of him cuddling with his 8-month-old sister Bellaritza, with whom he was especially close. At night, she collapses on the bed in their room and smells the pair of pants he changed out of before he left home for the last time.

She said she is planning to bury him in New Jersey, a cheaper option than New York, if she can afford it.

“As a mom, they killed me with him,” Beritza Colina said. “It’s horrible to feel like I’m still looking for him. I call his phone and he doesn’t respond.”

“It’s been very hard,” she added.