Robert K. Boyce, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, discussed the continuing investigation at a news conference on Friday, after an article in The Daily News earlier that day drew calls for a federal hate crime investigation. The report compared Mr. McKenzie’s death to that in 1986 of Michael Griffith, 23, of Brooklyn, who was hit by a car and killed, as he fled a violent white mob who chased him onto a highway in Howard Beach, Queens.

Image Oneyger Richardson, Mr. McKenzie’s sister, showing a photo of him on her smartphone. Credit... Yana Paskova for The New York Times

“This comparison is inaccurate and irresponsible, actually,” Chief Boyce said. “You can understand the fervor this caused.”

Unlike Mr. Griffith’s case, he said, the investigation into Mr. McKenzie’s death has not uncovered any evidence to indicate that racial bias had played a role in inciting the conflict. Bias and hate crimes investigators were assisting with the investigation, he said.

The Daily News report included statements from Diane Fatigati, 53, a retired police officer, who witnessed part of the encounter and rendered aid to the dying teenager. In the article, and again to reporters on Friday, she said she had heard the group of white teenagers using the slur to taunt Mr. McKenzie, 16, and his friends, all of them black.

But the police said that Ms. Fatigati had not mentioned the slur to investigators until they interviewed her a second time on Thursday. The police had also interviewed six people involved in the conflict, and none of them said they had heard the slur, Chief Boyce said.