A gunman fatally shot a 27-year-old man in the head and chest on Tuesday inside a Crown Heights park, according to police.
Officers responded to an alert from the NYPD’s ShotSpotter detection system near East New York and Buffalo avenues, where they found the victim unconscious and unresponsive on a walking path near the newly reopened tennis courts inside Lincoln Terrace Park just before noon, cops said.
First responders pronounced the victim dead at the scene. His identity has not yet been released, pending proper family notification, according to police.
An unidentified man was seen screaming near the scene Tuesday afternoon, yelling, “that’s my friend that got killed, damn I can’t believe he’s gone.”
A nearby resident, Peter Jones, said he was just getting home from work when he heard the shots.
“I was coming down East New York Avenue and I heard pop pop — I called 911,” Jones said. “He was bleeding heavy from the head. They say black lives matter but we are still killing our own. It is sad.”
Another local resident, Michael Thomas, said he was shocked by the continuing violence.
“We have to do a better job in the community of raising our people,” he said. “We need to get these guns off the street.”
Authorities have not yet made any arrests in connection to the incident, and the investigation is ongoing.
The broad daylight shooting comes on the heels of a recent citywide uptick in gun violence, and a particularly deadly holiday weekend where gunmen killed nine people and wounded 41 others.
In the 77th Precinct, where Tuesday’s incident took place, shootings were up 21.4 percent year-to-date as of June 28, according to NYPD statistics. However, that spike represents just three additional incidents in the precinct compared to this time last year, when there were 14 as opposed to 17 so far this year.
The increase in shootings is a citywide trend, as shooting incidents throughout the Five Boroughs were up almost 130 percent as of June 28 — from 355 year-to-date, to 511 in 2020.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday that he was “very concerned” about the spike in gun violence, and that he plans to meet with the city’s district attorneys to discuss ways to curb the violence.
Anyone with information in regard to this incident is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the CrimeStoppers website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM, or on Twitter @NYPDTips. All calls are strictly confidential.
Additional reporting by Todd Maisel
