East Harlem grandma, Robin Wright, and the 18-year-old who shot her to death, Fasil McCants. (
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The teenager who shot and killed beloved East Harlem grandma, Robin Wright, 69, during a wild gunfight with rivals on August 27, 2025, has been sentenced for his crimes. Faisil McCants, who was then 18, will serve 37.5 years in federal prison for possessing a machine gun and firing 15 rounds—including the one which struck Wright, an innocent bystander, in the face.
McCants pleaded guilty to these charges on Nov. 4, 2025.
Wright, who depended on a walker, was returning home from a nearby Chinese restaurant with her friend, Juanita Arnold when she was caught by stray gunfire outside the C Town grocery on the northwest corner of East 110th Street and Madison Avenue, within the confines of the 23rd Precinct.
Wright was a resident of NYCHA Lehman Houses, and whose campus extends to the intersection’s southeast corner, which is co-named Tito Puente Way. Wright lived there with her grandson.
McCants was arrested on Sept. 4, 2025—on federal armed robbery and weapons charges—by Homeland Security and NYPD Violent Crimes Task Force officers. While it was expected that state murder and assault charges would follow, this has yet to occur.
With McCants’ arrest came clarification of the events preceding Wright’s sudden death.
McCants and two accomplices had robbed a streetside marijuana dealer who appeared to be sleeping in his chair near the corner Madison Avenue and East 109th Street. The dealer awoke, however, and chased the thieves east on 110th Street.
McCants, by then near Park Avenue, pulled a black firearm—equipped with a machine-gun conversion device—out of his right sweatshirt pocket—and began shooting, killing Wright nearly a block away.
“Oh, my God! Oh, you are all right, Miss Robin?’” Wright’s friend Juanita Arnold told the Daily News. “And she said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Are you shot?’ She said, ‘Yes.’”
“Faisil McCants, a repeat violent offender, unloaded 15 bullets in a matter of seconds in the middle of the day on the street in East Harlem, killing Robin Wright, a 69-year-old, wholly innocent woman and forever destroying a family,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton after McCants’ sentencing. “It is an unspeakable tragedy, born of wanton violence that outrages all New Yorkers and all Americans. New York City families expect and deserve to be free from purveyors of violence.”
Multiple members of Wright’s family submitted letters to the Court describing her as a loving parent and grandmother who was simply enjoying her afternoon when she crossed paths with McCants’ gunfire.
Wright’s death recalled a stray-bullet slaying of another senior woman the previous April 26 in Harlem. Beloved community figure 61-year-old Excenia “Mama Zee” Mette was caught in a late-night gun battle when she stepped from her apartment to check on her adult grandson outside and was killed by a stray bullet.
Two men involved in that gunfight, Ricky Shelby, then 24, and Darious Smith, then 23, are each awaiting trial on murder and weapons charges.