Investigators were looking at those possibilities Sunday to explain what led to a shooting that left Goode and three others dead after a gunfight inside the Triple A Aces Private & Social Rental Place in Crown Heights, said a police official, who requested anonymity to discuss an investigation in its early stages.
Witnesses told the police that Goode, 37, pulled a gun inside the club just before 7 a.m. Saturday and told everyone to get down, the official said. He fired a warning shot into the ceiling, and then turned the gun on fellow gamblers packed into the small space.
Before he was shot by a bouncer standing guard, Goode had killed two of his own acquaintances, the official said.
The bouncer, Dominick Wimbush, 47, was shot and killed in the crossfire, as were Terrence Bishop, 36, and John Thomas, 32. All the men lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant except for Goode, whose last known address was in Canarsie. It was the second quadruple homicide in New York City in a week.
Bishop’s brother, Eddie Baldwin, told reporters gathered at Triple A Aces on Sunday that investigators think Goode believed he was losing the card game because his competitors were cheating.
“The detectives told us a guy at the club was cheated and wanted his money back,” Baldwin, 35, said.
The police said investigators were still trying to pin down a precise motive for the shooting and to figure out how the social club operated. There were no arrests Sunday, the police said, and it was still unclear whether anyone would be charged with a crime.
On Sunday afternoon, police tape still hung from the edges of the compact wood frame town house at 74 Utica Ave., less than two blocks from the local precinct, where the shooting occurred. Two uniformed police officers kept watch on the sidewalk as lights flashed from their patrol car parked at the curb.
Inside, investigators recovered shell casings indicating that Goode had fired 15 rounds from a 9 mm handgun, the police official said. Wimbush returned four rounds from a revolver before he was killed. The police said Saturday that crime-scene investigators recovered both guns.
Neighbors had complained the club was a nuisance. The police had been there just once in response to a call for aid, but no crime was reported at the time, the official said.
The police chief of patrol, Rodney Harrison, said he was bothered by the fact that the club seemed to be a known problem in the neighborhood, but had not been reported to the police.
“I need the community to work with us and stop these operations, because if you don’t, unfortunate things may happen,” Harrison said.
On Sunday, the building’s owner, Samuel Revells, stood outside and waited for the police to give him permission to go inside and inspect the damage.
Revells said he had owned the building for more than 20 years and rented it to the operator of the social club for the past two years. But he said he did not know anything about the establishment or any of the people who congregated there.
“Let him be the one that speaks on this,” he said of the club operator, whose name he refused to share.
Baldwin, Bishop’s brother, said the killing compounded the grief the family was dealing with after the recent death of their father from cancer. The brothers had planned to meet Sunday, Baldwin’s birthday.
Instead, he said, he was questioning why his brother had died. “Money has been here before you and been here after you,” he said. “I mean what’s the whole purpose?”
On Sunday afternoon, three votive candles and a bow-tied bouquet in plastic wrap sat in the doorway of the apartment building in Bedford-Stuyvesant where the police said Wimbush lived.
“May you find faith and peace in your time of need,” read a handwritten note on the bouquet’s card. Family members entering and leaving the building declined to comment. A neighbor, Eddie Williams, 36, said he knew the slain guard as “Nick,” and said he last saw him, as usual, on Friday getting coffee.
“I see him every morning,” Williams said. “We always have our talk and drink a little coffee, and I never in my life heard nothing bad about Nick.”
This article originally appeared in
.