Teens arrested in murder of Bronx man who was community peacekeeper

Two teenagers were arrested on the street in the Bronx for stabbing the death of a former inmate known in his neighborhood as a peacekeeper.

Cops said Prince McMichael, 27, was on a bus bound for Brooklyn on September 16 when he got into a fight with several other passengers.

The fight spilled out along Bruckner Blvd and Wilkinson Ave. near Pelham Bay Park, where McMichael was stabbed multiple times in the chest shortly before 10 p.m.

McMichael was rushed to Jacobi Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

Police used surveillance footage from the bus to help track down two of the suspects.

Angel Rivera, 19, charged with murder, manslaughter and gang assault, and a 16-year-old, charged with manslaughter and gang assault, were arrested. Cops said they were among four people involved in the attack. Two others are wanted.

McMichael, who lived in Co-op City, had a long record of arrests, including one that saw him serving three years in prison for a weapons conviction. Records show he was paroled in May 2019, after which he began to turn his life around, according to a friend.

“When this man got out of prison, he went to the other side and personally ended the beef with all the other sections,” said his lifelong friend Anthony Florence, 30, citing turf wars in the housing estate where they lived. “He created the peace treaty between all the other sections.”

But not everyone kept the truce, Florence said, and peacekeeping efforts ended up putting a target on McMichael’s back. Florence said locals were shooting McMichael for a while

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“People didn’t like him in the other sections,” Florence said. “He always looked nice, he always had a cute girl with him. So many envious. We didn’t start this co-op town war. The geography of the co-op town started this. He was attacked by heaps of times. We couldn’t keep track of how many times. He was always outside with a cast on his arm or something.

Florence said McMichael was the target of at least one drive-by shooting years ago, along with countless other stabbings and assaults.

“Prince was the neighborhood before it was a gang or whatever,” Florence said. “He only turned into the Hulk when he needed to.”

Cops said they don’t know any motive for the murder or what the fight was about on the bus.

Florence said her friend has worked regularly in several retail businesses since serving his sentence.

“He was putting his life in order,” Florence said. “He said to me, ‘I’m trying to change my life. I have a legacy. “He made a few mistakes. He responded for these errors. He realized that the things he was doing weren’t necessarily the best. He strapped in and started doing what he had to do.

Anyone with information regarding this crime is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477)