On June 9th, five people were shot on the Park Department's Brighton Beach Boardwalk including 16-year old East Harlem girl, Tysha Jones who was tragically killed. Iloune Driver, a 21-year-old Crip from East New York, Brooklyn, shown here being arrested, was charged and is on trial for second-degree murder for the shooting that killed the innocent teenager and wounded four others. (Photo: Todd Maisel/New York Daily News)
Over the twelve weeks leading up to that incident there had been twelve shootings, including five deaths, and more than a dozen stabbings and muggings and numerous sexual assaults in parks. And since January there had been more than 150 arrests on park land including 98 in Union Square Park alone and the Summer had yet to begin.
"Frankly, I think it's a shame for people to sort of gin it up and try to panic people into believing that parks are not safe," then Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe embarrassingly stated as the public once again called for more protection in parks.
"They're safer than they've ever been," he said.
"They're safer than they've ever been," he said.
Brooklyn
A few seconds of video evidence may determine the courtroom fate of a gangbanger accused of spraying bullets over a jam-packed boardwalk in Brooklyn two years ago, killing an innocent teenage girl and wounding four others, according to the New York Daily News.
Iloune Driver, 21, whose trial for second-degree murder began Tuesday, fired at a rival in Brighton Beach on a sunny day in June 2011, fatally striking a bystander, Tysha Jones, 16, who was hanging out with friends, a prosecutor said.
Chaos ensued at the Brighton Beach Boardwalk when a fight erupted into a shooting.
(Photo: Patrick Q. Barr for NY Daily News)
“All she was doing was going to the beach,” prosecutor Janet Gleeson said in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
“But those were the last moments of her life.”
No weapons or ballistic evidence tie Driver — an avowed Crip who has the words “True Blue” tattooed across his chest — to the crime.
Tysha Jones, 16, an innocent bystander, was killed in the Brighton Beach Boardwalk shooting on June 9, 2011. (Photo: Michael Schwartz/New York Daily News)
Gleeson said two witnesses identified Driver as the gunman. She said shots were fired as a group of Crips taunted a rival crew of Bloods.
“That’s what it was all about — gang stupidity,” Gleeson said.
But defense lawyer Mario Romano argued that video of the shooting’s immediate aftermath refutes the witnesses’ statements that Driver was on the sand when he fired; the video, the lawyer said, shows Driver on the boardwalk a few seconds after the crowd begins to scramble for cover.
Romano said Driver was “running away from the mayhem, like everybody else.”
Driver was apprehended by police as he entered the subway. He wasn’t initially charged, but named others as the assailants, Gleeson said. A witness called a police department tip line a few days later and identified him as the shooter.
Read More:
New York Daily News -
October 22, 2013 -
Oren Yaniv
A Walk In The Park -
June 15, 2011 - By Geoffrey Croft
A Walk In The Park
- June 13, 2011
A Walk In The Park - June 10, 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment