Five people were killed overnight in a rash of violence across Brooklyn, police said Thursday morning – just as elected officials and community leaders met in the borough to talk about gun violence prevention in honor of National Gun Violence Survivors week.
The first was a fatal shooting at around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday on Atlantic Avenue and Rockaway Avenue in Brownsville. Police found a 28-year-old man hanging out of a car with multiple gunshot wounds to the torso, and he was pronounced dead at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center.
The man’s identity was withheld, as police continued the investigation and worked to notify his family. No arrests were made.
Police said the next incident happened just after 1 a.m. Thursday on 2nd Street in Park Slope, where first responders found a man and a woman both dead with gunshot wounds in an apparent murder-suicide.
Both victims were 34 years old, according to police, and their names have not been released. Officials said a gun was recovered near the man.
The last shooting victim was a 35-year-old man, whom police found at around 2:40 a.m. Thursday on Hall Street in Clinton Hill. He was shot once in the head, according to NYPD officials, and pronounced dead at Brooklyn Hospital.
No arrests were immediately made, though officials said a gun was recovered at that scene as well. Police did not release the man’s name while they worked to notify his family.
On Atlantic and Rockaway avenues, 24-year-old Tyreek Lewis recalled seeing a car riddled with bullets in the aftermath of the shooting that killed the 28-year-old man.
He said he wasn’t sure what could be done to minimize gun violence in the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods.
“It’s just a regular day in Brownsville,” Lewis said. “This is how it is, it’s been like this. I don’t know if there’s a way to really stop it, because criminals are still going to get their hands on guns, regardless.”
“No matter how many times the police try to step up, they’re still going to find a way to get their hands on one,” he added.
The shootings occurred in the midst of city programming around National Gun Violence Survivors Week.
Earlier Wednesday, New York Rep. Dan Goldman (D), Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, and City Councilmembers Crystal Hudson and Alexa Aviles convened with victims and survivors of gun violence to address possible solutions to the pervasive issue.
Among those who contributed to the roundtable were two mothers whose teenage sons were killed in Brooklyn shootings.
“It's constantly happening every day,” said Pam Hight, whose son Ya-Quin English was gunned down in Gravesend in 2013 when he was 17. “It's not even called mass shooting. It's everyday shooting.”
Though gun violence decreased significantly across the city in 2023, it continues to affect communities of color at disproportionate rates.
Goldman quoted a statistic he attributed to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, that 97% of New York’s gun violence victims were Black or Brown.
“This is a widespread problem that needs a full rotation, full bucket of solutions,” Goldman said, before calling for investments in education, mental health treatment, substance abuse and violence interrupter groups.
“We gonna keep fighting, but we're tired,” Hight said. “We shouldn't have to be killing each other. We should be out here [doing] double dutch, barbecues, block parties. We stopped all that. Now we have to look over our shoulders on the trains, on the buses, walking out our doors.”
“There are few words for the tragedies that took place in Brooklyn last night,” Borough President Antonio Reynoso said of the violence. “We must understand that while gun regulation is a significant part of this work, we will only get a handle on this issue when we commit to a holistic approach that recognizes that housing, jobs, healthcare, education and childcare are the building blocks of safe and healthy communities.”
Police initially reported that a fifth person was shot and killed Wednesday night on Schenectady Avenue in Crown Heights, but re-classified the incident as a stabbing on Friday.
According to the NYPD, first responders discovered 37-year-old Barrington Howell in a pool of blood on the sidewalk around 11 p.m., with a neck wound cops initially thought had been caused by a gun.
Officials later said Howell had been stabbed at a nearby building on Sterling Place, where investigators found bloody airpods and a bloody cellphone in the garbage. He then collapsed on Schenectady Avenue, and was taken to NYC Health and Hospitals/Kings County where he was pronounced dead.
Detectives at the Crown Heights scene on Thursday morning canvassed local bodegas for video footage, and members of the NYPD’s Crime Scene Unit took photos of evidence markers.
A bloody puffer jacket on the sidewalk was surrounded by crime scene tape as bystanders wondered who had been killed.
On Friday, police charged 39-year-old Jamel Miles with murder, robbery and criminal weapons possession in the case. Miles lived at the address where he allegedly stabbed Howell, according to police.
Correction: Due to inaccurate information originally provided by the NYPD, this story has been updated to reflect one of the victims was fatally stabbed.
