Cops: Teen arrested in fatal July stabbing
Keyarra Frisby is accused of killing Anita Cotton during a street fight July 5.
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A HUNTING PARK teen has been arrested in connection to the stabbing death of another girl during a July 5 brawl, police said.
Keyarra Frisby, 18, is charged with murder and related offenses after allegedly stabbing Anita Cotton, 17, in the neck during a melee outside a Walgreens on Broad Street, according to police.
Homicide detectives arrested Frisby on Thursday at her home on Fairhill Street near Hunting Park Avenue. She remained in custody last night, denied bail, court records show.
The fight that claimed Cotton's life had its roots in an altercation on South Street following the Fourth of July fireworks at Penn's Landing, police said.
Cotton and her friends got into an argument with another group of girls from their neighborhood, a spat that nearby police officers broke up. Not long after, the dispute started anew as the teens got off SEPTA's Broad Street Line at the Hunting Park station.
From there, they took the fight into the parking lot of a nearby Walgreens, on Broad near Hunting Park Avenue, where surveillance footage captured the violence.
That footage shows Cotton and another young woman grappling, clawing at each other's hair and face, Homicide Capt. James Clark said at the time.
At one point, the video shows the unidentified girl thrusting a sharp object upward into Cotton's neck. Cotton jerks backward, her hand clutching the wound, takes a few steps and collapses.
A police spokeswoman said yesterday that investigators identified Frisby through that video and believe she is the one seen making that deadly attack.
Officers passing by at about 3:15 a.m. saw the crowd of teens and ran to the scene, police said. They found Cotton lying on the lot's pavement in a pool of blood.
Those officers took her to Einstein Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead just before 4 a.m.
Cotton's family told the Daily News at a vigil July 6 that she was an ambitious student with her eyes set on college: She had graduated from Northeast High a few weeks before her death after taking time off for the birth of her 2-year-old daughter, London.
"She was a very good person; she was not a fighter," Cotton's grandmother Anita Anderson said at that vigil.
"She loved everyone, and she smiled every day."