Homicide in a Lobby
September 23, 2008
A 19-year-old man was shot to death in the lobby of a building in East Flatbush, police said.
Residents of the building at 68 E. 19th St. heard a series of gunshots at around 10:30 p.m. on Monday night. They said they called police, who arrived quickly at the crime scene. They found the man, identified as Jamel Wisdom, dead in the lobby. At the corner of 19th Street, another man, who remains unidentified, was shot in his leg a few minutes after Wisdom was shot. He was taken to the hospital and is now in stable condition, police reported.
The shooting was the result of an argument between two groups of young people, police said.
John Negron, who has lived in the building for 17 years, said a series of gunshots woke him up from his sleep.
“I was sleeping, I got woken up by gunshots at 10:31 p.m,” he said.” “I looked out of the window, I didn’t see anyone expect a couple of teenagers running in the street.”
A few minutes later, he heard a few more gunshots in the street.
“I think they followed him inside the building. There were a few minutes between the gunshots,” he said.
Negron saw the police taking the dead body away and as he was leaving the building to go to work, he saw a bloody sweater, a phone and sneakers that belonged to Wisdom.
Carlos Ayala, the superintendent of the building, said that one of the people involved in the shooting, not Wisdom, was a resident of the building but that he did not know anything about him because he avoided some of the residents in order to stay away from trouble.
“I don’t get involved with these people,” he said. “They drink and do drugs.”
Alfonso Ayala, the superintendent’s brother, said that the shooting was caught on the three cameras that were in the lobby.
Another resident of the building, John Kennedy, whose apartment is right by the lobby said, “I was in my kitchen, there was some fight, it was so loud and then boom boom boom. It was crazy.”
Negron said that the neighborhood was unsafe and that he avoided spending any time in the dangerous streets of East Flatbush. He said “People mind their own business, and this is how you survive.”
A group of police officers, who stood in front of the building to protect the crime scene, said that the seemingly quiet street becomes very dangerous at night and that this kind of shootings happened often in the neighborhood.