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Newly revealed surveillance video documents the March 2014 shooting that left a Dominican immigrant dead and a 14-year-old facing murder charges.
The video was shown in court yesterday as part of Kahton Anderson's ongoing murder trial for the shots he fired at members of a rival gang on a crowded B15 bus in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He missed his intended targets and instead hit Angel Rojas in the back of the head. Rojas was on his way to see his kids during a break between his two jobs.
As the video begins, a woman with two small children can be seen in the right of the frame carefully seating them both in what appears to be the front of the bus. When the shot rings out, she huddles over the kids and presses down, down, until all three of them disappear between the seats.
The Times reported prosecutor Nicole Chavis describing the scene like this:
"A woman seated behind Mr. Rojas saw a hole in his head, then felt her clothes were warm. She realized it was blood and began to scream."
Rojas is obscured in the Daily News's version of the video. The Post, in publishing a screenshot of the video, did not bother to blur out Rojas slumped over in his seat.
Anderson, who is being tried as an adult, grew up in the Sumner Houses in Bed-Stuy. Prosecutors claim he fell into a street crew called the Stack Money Goons, which was feuding with a group out of the Marcy Houses called the Twan Family. Twan Family members shot at Anderson earlier that afternoon, and he retrieved the gun, which prosecutors say he acquired at age 12, from friends he shared it with. The DA's office argued that Anderson went out that afternoon armed because he was looking to shoot his enemies.
Andrerson's Legal Aid attorney, Frederic Pratt, doesn't dispute that his client fired the fatal shot with a .357 Magnum, but says he used the weapon because he was afraid for his life.
The Times reports that Anderson's mother sent him upstate in 2013 to live with his grandmother and stay away from the violence, but he returned a few weeks before the shooting in early 2014, when his grandfather died. Pratt described the gang conflict as something Anderson couldn't escape.
"It's literally been going on for generations," Pratt argued. "The young men in this trial were born into that situation."