Five people were killed overnight in a rash of shootings across Brooklyn – just as elected officials and community leaders met in the borough to talk about gun violence solutions in honor of National Gun Violence Survivors week.
According to police, the first incident happened at around 11 p.m. on Schenectady Avenue in Crown Heights, where first responders found a 37-year-old man with a gunshot wound to the neck. He was taken to NYC Health and Hospitals/Kings County, where he was pronounced dead, according to officials.
His name was not immediately released, and police took a person of interest into custody.
Thirty minutes later, police said officers responded to another fatal shooting on Atlantic Avenue and Rockaway Avenue in neighboring Bed-Stuy. A 28-year-old man was discovered with multiple gunshot wounds to the torso, and he was pronounced dead at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center.
The man’s identity was also withheld, as police continued the investigation and worked to notify his family. No arrests had been made as of Thursday morning.
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.
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’d heard from 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’re 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.”
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