A passenger on a B15 bus was killed last night by a teenager who was apparently targeting a rival. Witnesses said the 14-year-old was shooting "wildly" as he hit Angel Rojas, 39, in the back of the head. Rojas, who died at Woodhull Hospital, had been going home between his two jobs to say hello to his family. His wife told the Post, "He was a man that just worked for his family."
Angel Rojas
The police received the call about the shooting at 6:20 p.m. and boarded the bus at Lafayette Boulevard and Marcus Garvey Boulevard. The bus had stopped in front of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps, where cadets and instructors were training. They jumped into action. Instructor Shanida Robinson said, "It was absolute hysteria. People were sitting around the gunshot patient, and there were also people around the scene who weren't sure what was happening, weren't sure where the perpetrator was at the time."
Nigel Phillips said told WCBS 2, "There were a lot of rounds, a lot of blood, you know, a lot of people running and screaming. Actually, only one round hit the patient." But it was enough to kill Rojas, who lived in East Flatbush with his wife and two children, ages 12 and 8.
The police took a 14-year-old boy into custody and also found a gun on him. A source told the Daily News, "One kid pulls out a gun and he lets off a couple of rounds,. He’s running out of the bus, still letting rounds go, and this poor guy gets shot in the back of the head. He wasn’t the intended victim."
One man who works nearby told WCBS 2, "I work right here in the supermarket. There was four or five shots. It sounded like a cannon - like somebody just came out here and let off an old, ancient cannon." Another compared the sound to fireworks, "like Roman candles." And Henry Joseph said to the Post, "Where does a 14-year-old get firepower like that? The neighborhood is going to the dogs."
Witnesses told the Post that "two girls callously laughed at the grisly outcome. 'I told them to stop laughing, it wasn’t funny, someone was really hurt,' one witness said. 'I wasn’t the only one who told them to stop.'" The shooter was identified in the News as Kahton Anderson; his grandfather said, "He’s just a good kid...This is the ghetto. You hang out with the wrong crowd and things happen. This is his first real contact with the police."
Rojas worked a 12-hour shift at a fruit stand on Grand Avenue and then worked at a deli on Clarkson; in between, he'd go home to "hug his children." His son Saury told the NY Times, "That was very bad of [the shooter]. He’s too small to be with a gun. If he didn’t have that gun, my dad would be alive now."
