‘We’re just trying to hold on’: Family mourns mother killed while pushing stroller in Manhattan
She sat at the foot of her mother’s casket, dressed like an angel, her pearl white gown dotted with sequins and a headband no bigger than a bracelet holding back her hair.
Little Khloe was the only one in the room who was with Azsia Johnson when she was violently killed last month, gunned down on an Upper East Side street as she pushed her 3-month-old baby in a stroller.
And, mercifully, Khloe was the only one who had no clue about why she was there.
She sat in a stroller like the one her mother was pushing that awful day, surrounded by bouquets of pink and white roses.
Like the mourners who filled the rows at the Brooklyn Funeral Home and Cremation, Khloe cried, but she was just hungry. Then a relative came up from the back and whisked her out of the room.
“We’re just trying to hold on,” said Lisa DeSort, who sat beside the stroller. “This here is all family. She was one of 10 kids. We’re just trying to hold on. It’s hard to believe.”
That was DeSort’s daughter in the cotton white casket, her daughter’s arms folded forever across her chest.
She watched as mourners, including Mayor Adams, filed by slowly for one last look before the coffin was closed. It would be her last look, too.
Just weeks ago, DeSort was telling anyone who would listen that her daughter was in danger. She said after her daughter’s death that Johnson had been the victim of domestic violence.
Johnson, 20, was pushing her baby on E. 95th St. and Lexington Ave., just a few steps from the Samuel Seabury Playground, when a man dressed in black stormed up and shot her point blank in the back of the head about 8:30 p.m. on June 29.
Medics rushed her to Metropolitan Hospital, but she could not be saved. Khloe, the infant girl, was not harmed.
Days later, cops arrested the baby’s father, Isaac Argro, 22, and charged him with murder.and criminal possession of a weapon.
Johnson had told a relative that she was planning to meet with Argro to talk things out, police said.
But instead of a meeting, a hooded gunman brazenly walked up to Johnson on Wednesday night and fired a single shot, cops said.
Friends and family remembered Johnson as a loving mother who was staying at a Manhattan shelter to get back on her feet. She was also the mother of a 3-year-old son.
They said she liked pretty, girly things and loved to dress up.
“This loss means more than I can say,” said Johnson’s brother, Peter Myers, who, like all the grieving family members, was dressed in pink and white.
“I can’t put it in words. My sister was the one who held it all together. We’re just doing all we can to take care of her kids. We want people to remember her name, remember what happened so lives are changed.”
