Make New York Post a Preferred Source Three accused members of the “Insane Crip Gangsters Babiez” were busted Thursday for fatally shooting a 12-year-old boy eating dinner inside a car in Brooklyn in a 2022 case of mistaken identity that shocked the city.
Kade Lewin’s mother burst into tears as her son’s alleged shooters Ousmane Diallo, 24, and Mayel Bussereth, 26, were hauled in front of a judge to face federal charges of killing the boy while opening fire on a sedan they thought belonged to a gang rival.
“She’s been waiting for a long time,” Pastor Gilford Monrose, the family’s spiritual adviser, said after the suspects were held without bail at a hearing in Brooklyn federal court.
“There’s no counsel that can prepare you for this,” Monrose added. “There’s only God.”
The killed boy’s mom Suzette Lewin wept, with a friend rocking her back and forth, in the courtroom gallery as a judge read aloud the charges against Diallo, Bussereth and a third alleged crew member, 25-year-old Jonah Luc, who allegedly served as the getaway driver, ferrying the killers to and from the scene of the East Flatbush shooting in a black Mercedes.
The 12-year-old had been eating dinner with family members inside the car at East 56th Street and Linden Boulevard at around 7:45 p.m. when he was shot in the head and chest, according to prosecutors. He died within 10 minutes.
Lewin’s 20-year-old female cousin was also shot several times, but survived, while an 8-year-old girl in the car witnessed the horrific shooting but wasn’t struck by any bullets, the feds say.
The deadly trio are part of the local “Babiez” crew — so dubbed because of the youth of its members — that has terrorized Crown Heights and Flatbush with a spree of shootings since 2019, Brooklyn US Attorney Joe Nocella and prosecutors said in a letter filed with the court.
Being a so-called “shooter” earned you respect in the crew, an offshoot of the Insane Crip Gangsters gang based in Long Beach, California, the feds wrote. The Brooklyn crew has allegedly been targeting rival gangs Folk Nation Gangster Disciples and 8 Trey Crips in a bloody turf war.
ICG Babiez members are also expected to chip into a fund meant for incarcerated gangsters, and some of them have allegedly engaged in various forms of bank fraud to fund the brutal group.
Lewin’s case had been sitting cold for years when investigators had a breakthrough in 2025 after nabbing the alleged getaway driver Luc on an unrelated check fraud charge, court papers say.
During questioning in that case, Luc admitted to having been inside the Mercedes at the scene of the boy’s death, prosecutors wrote while lobbying a judge to keep Luc locked up pending trial.
The alleged shooters Diallo and Bussereth now face a mandatory life sentence, and possibly the death penalty, if convicted of murder in aid of racketeering. Luc faces between 10 years and life on various assault and gun charges tied to Lewin’s death. All three pleaded not guilty Thursday.
Diallo, who the feds called a leader in the gang, has an extensive criminal history and had been out on probation on a 2021 robbery charge at the time of Lewin’s killing, prosecutors say. He’d received the lax sentence after pleading guilty to first-degree robbery as a youthful offender, the feds wrote.
He is now serving 14 years in state prison after pleading guilty to two attempted murders in Brooklyn.
Bussereth, the other alleged triggerman, was on pre-trial release at the time of the shooting on a gun possession charge he later pleaded guilty to, prosecutors say. He was sentenced in September 2022 to serve just under a year in jail in that case.
Luc had been in New Jersey state custody at the time of his arrest after pleading guilty to a violent robbery of a Home Depot, and was found guilty by a jury in June on all charges in his fraud case.
