A Brooklyn teenager used her last few breaths to tell cops the name of the man who shot her after she spurned his advances — as she struggled through an agonizing 20-minute wait for an ambulance, according to police testimony Monday.

Sixteen-year-old Shemel Mercurius was fatally shot inside a Brooklyn apartment last year by a 25-year-old man who wanted to date her, authorities said.

Inside Brooklyn Supreme Court on Monday, at the trial of Taariq Stephens — who is charged with murdering Shemel — the courtroom heard from the hero patrol cop who had labored to try and keep her alive.

Shemel, a junior at Edward R. Murrow High School, was babysitting her 3-year-old when Stephens allegedly showed up at the Brooklyn Ave. apartment and shot her three times with a submachine gun.

Responding NYPD officers kicked down the apartment door to find a horrifying scene.

“There was a 3-year-old male child … covered in blood crying next to the victim,” said Sgt. Ryan Habermehl, who testified that he immediately called EMS.

“It took about 20 minutes for EMS to arrive,” said Habermehl.

Officer Kyle Thomas Daly found Shemel, bleeding heavily.

“I put on gloves, took her off the car and laid her down and began rendering aid … she regained consciousness, gave me her name and date of birth,” said Daly, who has since left the NYPD to join the Suffolk County police department in Shirley, L.I.

“It took a very long time for the ambulance to come, about 20 minutes,” said Daly.

While Shemel was in and out of consciousness, the dying teen told another detective that Stephens wanted to be boyfriend and girlfriend, but she wasn’t interested, Daly said.

Shemel and Stephens met at a daycare center a week before the murder and exchanged phone numbers, authorities said.

An ambulance arrived at 6:55 p.m. and Mercurius died at Kings County Hospital at 7:57 p.m., according to testimony.

Shemel, who lived with her aunt after moving to the U.S. four years ago from Guyana, had buzzed a friend into the East Flatbush building where she was babysitting moments before she was shot.

Lona Junien took the stand to describe what she saw happening between Stephens and Shemel when she showed up to visit her friend.

“The person pushed her. The person said ‘Don’t ever lie to me.’ She was screaming, he took out the gun and shot her,” said Junien, 18.

If convicted, Stephens faces 25 years to life in prison for second-degree murder and weapons charges.

A pregnant woman’s boyfriend set her on fire in Capitol Heights, Maryland, critically injuring her and forcing her to deliver her baby, police said.

Prince George’s County police officers and firefighters found Andrea Grinage with critical burns on a large part of her body while responding to a fire about 11:45 a.m. Friday at 1405 Elkwood Lane, police said.

Grinage told police her boyfriend doused her with a flammable liquid inside her apartment and set her on fire. She also told police he may be on his way to D.C. to possibly harm one of her relatives, Prince George’s County police spokeswoman Jennifer Donelan said at a news conference Friday afternoon.

“She was very brave. We want her family to know how brave she was, suffering as badly as she was — critically burned, worried about her unborn child, dealing with those injuries and was able to share that information with us so that we could get moving with our investigation and locate this person,” Donelan said.

Medics took Grinage to a hospital, where she delivered the baby. Police said she and the baby are alive.

“These are not the circumstances under which this baby was to be born,” Donelan said.

Grinage’s father, Arthur Grinage, said the baby, a girl, was born seven weeks premature and is doing OK.

“She’s hanging in there. She’s doing fine. She’s beautiful,” he said.

Police said the suspect turned himself in to police in Washington, D.C., and is in custody. Charges are pending against the suspect.

Relatives and neighbors said the suspect is the woman’s boyfriend. Neighbors said they heard the two arguing Thursday night.

“He’s a coward. He’s less than a man. Walk away if you don’t want the responsibility. Walk away,” the victim’s father said.

Source: Woman Delivers Baby Early After Boyfriend Allegedly Sets Her on Fire in Capitol Heights – NBC4 Washington http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Pregnant-Woman-in-Critical-Condition-After-Domestic-Incident-in-Capitol-Heights-443294003.html#ixzz4sIEGI8dE
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Jasmine Orsted said the comments began almost immediately after she started practicing with other hopefuls seeking spots on the University of Mary Washington’s women’s basketball team.

One white player openly mused about “why black people name their kids the way they do,” Orsted recalled. Another white woman responded that she “never had to worry about that,” because her high school “wasn’t in the ghetto,” adding that she was glad there were only one or two black players on her high school team.

“I was astounded,” Orsted said of her 2014 experience at the Fredericksburg, Va., school. “I couldn’t believe that somebody would actually say that, especially in the presence of somebody that’s black.”

Orsted was ultimately barred from trying out for the team because of what the coach deemed a lack of “chemistry” with other players, according to her lawsuit. Believing that “chemistry” meant tolerating racism, Orsted sued the university in federal court in Virginia and settled last month for $160,000.

As part of the agreement, Mary Washington did not acknowledge wrongdoing. But it did commit to bringing in an outside professional to lead annual sensitivity and inclusion training for staff and students in the Athletic Department. And any student who participates in preseason activities for a sport will now be guaranteed a tryout.

Jasmine Orsted (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

The lawsuit comes at a time when many college campuses have been working to confront instances of racism. Orsted, who now attends Bowie State University on a basketball scholarship, said she hopes her decision to take a stand, instead of ignoring the comments, helps others. Without the support of her family and a youth coach, she said, she probably would “have been one of the ones to cry and just be sad.”

“I just want anybody else who goes though this to know that they have to believe in themselves and not let anybody make them think that they’re being too sensitive, that they’re the issue,” she said. “Not let the bullies win.”

As a condition of the settlement, Orsted will not disparage the school; however, she is allowed to recount the contentions in the lawsuit.

Orsted had come to Mary Washington in 2014 to play basketball, a sport she had loved since childhood. Because she had outperformed some of the university’s players during a year at Northern Virginia Community College, she was hopeful she’d spend a lot of time on the court. She could also save money by living at home in nearby Woodbridge, and her parents would be able to attend her games.

But as the preseason went on, the racial comments continued, Orsted said. One player expressed fear of going to a black church. Another said that black girls don’t shave because their legs are dark. When a girl said she had gone to Haiti, Orsted said another white player asked, “So, did you get a picture with a skinny little hungry black boy?”

When she was asked about her heritage, Orsted told the other women that she had an African American mother and a Norwegian father. She said they were incredulous.

“ ‘So you have a white dad who married a black woman and they had a baby together?’ ” she recalled one player asking. “And they just all fell on the ground laughing. And I’m standing there like — this is 2014 at the time, that’s not something unheard of, I don’t understand how it could be funny.”

There were two black players already on the team. Orsted said one made her own jokes about race — for example, saying that she was the rare black person who could swim. The other black player, according to Orsted, would laugh along with the white players at racial comments.

The only people who didn’t laugh, she said, were Orsted and another black newcomer. That student testified in a deposition that when she confronted other players about a racial joke, they responded with “weird looks” and began distancing themselves from her. The student, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, was also cut from the team before tryouts and has since left the school.

Orsted still wanted to try out. She thought that once the coach was present, the comments would stop, and that the other girls would begin to respect her as a teammate.

But about two weeks before tryouts, coach Deena Applebury called her in for a meeting and suggested she try a different sport.

“I don’t know if this is going to work, all right?” Applebury said, according to a transcript included in court papers, adding that she had heard Orsted was not “really bonding with the kids.”

Orsted brought up the racial comments, and Applebury promised to look into them. But, she added, “when you have, you know, a group versus one person, I kind of have to go to the group because it’s a team sport, for right, wrong, or otherwise.”

There’s a transcript because, at her mother’s prodding, Orsted secretly recorded the conversation. Sheila Holt-Orsted had also told her to keep a diary documenting jokes that made her uncomfortable.

Holt-Orsted had some experience in this area. A decade earlier she led a lawsuit — also settled — against Dickson, Tenn., for letting a known carcinogen contaminate drinking water in the county’s black neighborhood. Several members of her family died of cancer; she survived breast cancer.

“I really just thought that this could not be happening again,” Holt-Orsted said. “We’re in a situation where we just can’t back down and let people treat us indifferently.”

More confrontational than her soft-spoken daughter, she went to school officials with her husband but said she found little support. Orsted recalled that one human-resources administrator suggested that it was a “compliment” to say that black women don’t have to shave their legs.

The family sued, with the help of Alexandria civil rights attorney Victor Glasberg.

Vernon Brooks, who had coached Orsted in a youth league, described her as an “exceptional athlete.” During her time at Mary Washington, Orsted called him to vent, sometimes crying over what teammates had said. “At first, initially I thought, they’re competing. that happens a lot in college. . . . But then as we continued to talk, I could feel the emotion coming out and that it might be something more.”

After the suit began, Orsted looked through old yearbooks at the library. She noticed that in the past 14 years, there had been only three African Americans on the women’s basketball team.

Rod Wood, who had coached the men’s basketball team for 18 years at the time Orsted was attending Mary Washington, testified in a deposition that he had warned Athletic Director Ken Tyler about racial issues at the school in 2013.

TOLEDO, Ohio — The FBI has arrested a Toledo church’s pastor and another man on charges of sex trafficking of children.

Cordell Jenkins, 46, and Anthony Haynes, 37, were taken into custody by FBI agents at their Toledo homes early on Friday morning, CBS affiliate WTOL-TV reports.

Jenkins is the pastor of Abundant Life Ministries in Toledo, WTOL-TV reports. Haynes rented a space at the University Bible Fellowship as the pastor of Greater Life Christian Center until 2016.

Federal documents accuse the men of recruiting, enticing and transporting people they knew were under 18 to engage in sex acts for pay. An agent’s criminal complaint says the alleged activity started three years ago with a girl who was then 14.

A U.S. magistrate judge Friday ordered Jenkins and Haynes held without bond until an April 13 hearing.

The Toledo Blade reports Jenkins shook his head “no” as charges were read and indicated he will hire an attorney. Haynes told the magistrate he needed a court-appointed attorney until he “made some phone calls.”