The officers attempted to stop him, but the man fled and then began shooting at their patrol car, the police said. The gunman tried to hide, but a neighbor soon alerted the police to his whereabouts. Cornered in a backyard, he took aim at the police again, and was killed in a hail of gunfire, the police said.
The overnight mayhem, in which no police officers were injured, happened just after 2:30 a.m. on Labor Day in a part of Brooklyn where 12 people were shot at a block party in July and crime rates remain twice the citywide average.
Incidents in some pockets of the city — northern Manhattan, northern Brooklyn and parts of Queens — have driven a 7.6% rise in shootings as of Sept. 1 compared to the same period last year, despite an overall decline in crime citywide, according to police statistics.
The death in Brownsville was one of three shootings that took place early Labor Day morning. At about the same time as the incident in Brownsville, a 50-year-old woman was killed in Flatbush, Brooklyn. About 90 minutes later, a drive-by shooting took place outside a nightclub in Richmond Hill.
The Flatbush shooting happened just a few hours before J’Ouvert, daybreak festivities that take place in Brooklyn to ring in the annual West Indian American Day Parade. It was not clear if it was connected to the J’Ouvert celebration, which has had issues with violence in the past and now takes place amid heavy security.
The Brownsville incident was also the second fatal shooting in the past several days involving a man taking aim at New York City police officers who were attempting to stop him. On Friday, a gunman in Jamaica, Queens, was killed by police after he fired at officers seeking to question him about a gang-related shooting.
In a Monday news conference, Chief Terence A. Monahan of the New York City Police Department said that the Labor Day shootout in Brownsville began during a regular overnight patrol.
“He had his face covered walking down the street, which is kind of suspicious on a warm evening,” Monahan said. “So they went to stop him. He immediately ran.”
By the time the encounter had ended, seven officers had fired at the masked gunman, one returning fire on the street near the intersection of Howard and Dumont avenues in the initial encounter, and six more in the backyard shootout.
Video footage shot by a photographer for Pix11 news showed a large police presence had already arrived in the area when the final backyard gunbattle began. Police officers ducked for cover as dozens of shots rang out. Monahan estimated officers had fired a total of 64 bullets.
Israel Morris, 70, who lives near the corner of Howard and Dumont, said he was awaked by helicopters flying over his neighborhood and “countless” lights of police cars flashing and cops at the scene.
“I heard five or six shots and helicopters flying over all night,” Morris said.
Nigel Brown, 50, who also lives on Howard Street, said that while shootings in the area are not uncommon, this was the first time a shooting-related death happened on his block.
“I thought they were firecrackers, but now I’m realizing they were gunshots,” he said.
The police said the Brownsville gunman, whose identity was not immediately released, was pronounced dead at Brookdale Hospital, and a semi-automatic handgun was recovered from the scene.
Roughly 3 miles away from the Brownsville shooting, police responded to a Newkirk Avenue address in Flatbush to find the woman shot and killed, a 45-year-old man shot multiple times in the chest and a third man, 27, bleeding from a stab wound to the chest.
The two injured men were transported to Kings County Hospital in critical condition. No arrests were made, and police said they were continuing to investigate both incidents.
In Richmond Hills, Queens, about an hour and a half after the Brooklyn incidents, three men in a white BMW fired shots at three men leaving the Mazi Nightclub on 91st Avenue.
Of the three men targeted, one, age 35, was killed, the second, a 28-year-old, was in critical condition at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center with a gunshot wound to the torso and the third, 27, shot in both legs, was in stable condition at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the police said. No arrests were made, and the incident remained under investigation.
This article originally appeared in
.