“Momma Zee” may be gone, but Harlem will never forget her.
Tears flowed freely as loved ones gathered Friday to honor beloved bodega owner Excenia Mette, 61, who was fatally gunned down by a stray bullet.
The emotional funeral service also drew Mayor Eric Adams and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who joined mourners in honoring Mette’s life — and condemning the senseless gun violence that snatched her away from her family, friends and community.
“She left her fingerprints on countless lives,” Sharpton told a crowd packed into Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
“Harlem holds you in our heart.”
Mette’s body, dressed head-to-toe in purple, lay in a metal casket wreathed in flowers.
A white horse-drawn carriage transported the casket through the neighborhood that Mette, who originally hailed from Peoria, Illinois, adopted as her home. Her family came from far and wide for her funeral.
Mette will be buried in the Land Of Lincoln.
The memorial caps a whirlwind nearly two weeks since two men — Ricky Shelby, 23, and Darious Smith, 23 — allegedly exchanged gunfire over a pointless beef in front of Mette’s apartment building at Lenox Avenue and 113rd Street.
Neighbors said Foot, who was also known as Excenia Foote, ran outside to check on her grandson when she heard the gunfire late April 22.
She got caught in the crossfire and was accidentally, fatally shot in the head by Shelby, police alleged.
The senseless shooting death shocked Harlem, where Mette was a neighborhood fixture roundly adored for her generosity, warmth and activism with Sharpton’s National Action Network.
She became the first black woman to own a bodega in the city when she opened Momma Zee’s Food to Plez Deli in the 1980s.
Comedian Solo Jones, 58, who was managed by Mette, claimed his friend knew her killer.
“Everyone knows him,” Jones said. “They’re neighborhood kids.
“To die by the hands of somebody you help… She helped him numerous times…,” he said, unable to finish the sentence.
Mayor Eric Adams, who attended the private memorial, noted Smith had been accused of stabbing two people nearly a year before the tragic shooting.
“This is a sum of the accumulation of what we’ve been speaking about for years — the system of recidivism,” he said.
Smith was out on $10,000 bail when police said he rode a scooter to West 113rd Street and Lenox Avenue and shot at a group of people.
Another man — Shelby, police allege — fired back a half-dozen gunshots, including one that accidentally struck Mette in the head.
Shelby had been arrested and charged in 2020 shooting that unfolded just blocks away from the gun battle that claimed Mette’s life, according to sources and a criminal complaint.
“She probably fed the guy that shot her, probably gave him clothes,” Sharpton said. “So we cannot — in the midst of celebrating and remembering how much she meant to us — not denounce the kind of insensitive, blind violence that we show each other.
“If you need a gun to be a man, you’re a punk.”
