Two men were shot dead in East Flatbush outside a barbershop on Avenue A last night. The Daily News reports that 38-year-old Lennox Lewis and 26-year-old Dwayne Pascoe were gunned down in front of Diffrance Barbershop while they were hanging out with friends just after 8 p.m. (Earlier reports said that the two men had gotten into a fight when they shot each other.) Also injured was Pascoe's father, who is in critical condition at Brookdale Hospital. Both murder victims were also fathers—Lewis had three children and Pascoe two, with one on the way. Apparently the bodies of both men remained on the sidewalk for several hours. A neighbor told NY1, "Nobody deserves to die like that and to have to lay in the street and for everybody just be gawking at their bodies 'cause it was just a horrible scene before the police got here, they were just laying there." more ›

A pair of new mother are planning to sue Brooklyn's Brookdale Hospital for allegedly getting their babies mixed up. Shaquana Brown and Shatiesha Brown, who are not related, both gave birth to little girls on January 31. However, Shatiesha Brown was being monitored afterwards and wasn't allowed to see her baby, Aniya, for 24 hours—during which time, the infant was brought to Shaquana Brown, who said, "I was happy. I was holding her. Her father was holding her. I was breastfeeding her." But then a nurse told her later that the baby wasn't hers (there was also an incident at the nursery window between both Brown families, arguing over the baby) and it apparently took the hospital 30 minutes to find her baby. Shatiesha Brown was also devastated, because little Aniya, having fed on another woman's breastmilk, was rejecting her own mother's milk. Shatiesha Brown's lawyer told WABC 7, "There are so many ways to prevent this from happening and the hospital failed in every way." more ›

240 employees at Brooklyn's Brookdale Hospital returned to work from the weekend to discover that they no longer had jobs. The layoffs came as a surprise to the doctors, nurses and workers who received pink slips today. The workers' union staged an impromptu rally outside the Brownsville hospital, insisting that patient safety is being compromised and expressing fears that the hospital will close down. Brookdale officials did not address any rumors of its potential demise, but did say that there will also be a hiring freeze. They blamed the cuts on "inadequate reimbursements, larger numbers of uninsured patients and unreasonable and well-documented abusive practices by a number of health insurers and managed care organizations, with little external relief expected." Governor Paterson has been on the defensive about his proposed health care cuts in the current budget crunch. more ›

A family had been living in its Mill Basin, Brooklyn apartment for less than a week, when their 18-month-old toddler was struck by a bullet that passed through its ceiling from an upstairs apartment Thursday afternoon. Their upstairs neighbor is 24-year-old police officer, an Army veteran assigned to Manhattan's 1st Precinct, named Patrick Venetek. more ›

Yesterday morning, an off-duty police officer killed another clubgoer who was threatening another off-duty cop. At Brooklyn's The Elite Ark, which was having a Notorious B.I.G. tribute, a shoving match started that caused a commotion. Twenty-one year-old Kristen McKenzie allegedly fired a gun at an unarmed off-duty detective's head, but missed. The detective then tackled McKenzie, trying to get the gun, and the gun went off, injuring the detective. The NY Times reports that he "ended up on the ground with Mr. McKenzie straddling him." more ›

Run, Santa, Run, by David Reeves. more ›

A Metrocard scam. Gang members. A crowded L train station. Yesterday afternoon, a fight broke out between two men, and a bystander ended up dead. Fifty six year old Toolsie Sukhu, an immigrant who was headed home from a security guard job at the Brooklyn Pepsi plant, was shot in the back at the Rockaway Park Station in Canarsie. Apparently, some men were pulling the "give us $1 and we'll swipe you in" Metrocard scam that escalated when four other men came by. A fight broke out and someone pulled out a gun. Shots were fired and people, including many students from Canarsie High School, ran. Sukhu was shot when he entered the station. more ›

Three Brooklyn men, ages 16-20, were charged with hate crimes in the beating of Michael Sandy. Police believe that John Fox, Ilya Shurov, and Gary Timmins met Sandy online and lured him to Plumb Beach, an area off the Belt Parkway, with the intention of robbing him - because Sandy was gay. While setting up the meeting, they asked him to bring enough money for a hotel room. From the NY Post:

Fox then lured him to a spot by the parkway, where the suspect and three friends allegedly robbed and beat Sandy, whom they considered "an easy mark" because he is gay, police said. more ›

The NYPD's Hate Crimes Task Force is investigating why 28 year old black man ran into the Belt Highway, where he was hit by a car. Eyewitnesses say that two white men "struggled with" and "forced" Michael Sandy into traffic on Sunday night. Given that Sandy's race and the fact he was in Plumb Beach, a gay cruising area off the highway, the police have been investigating the incident as a possible hate crime. The Post has this account:

At about 9:40 p.m., he was confronted by two young white men, who began looking through the interior of the vehicle before Sandy ran off toward the Belt, witnesses told cops. more ›

The police played a 911 call made during Monday's Brooklyn barbecue shooting. The NYPD claimed that housing cop Jason Jeremiah was hit on the head with a Razor scooter, causing him to shoot the attacker and the call seemed to support that: "One guy is down because he beat the cop in the back with a bike, with a scooter, and the cop shot him...He took one of the kid's scooters and he beat the cop across the back." Officer Jeremiah shot Robert Ramirez in the chest, and Ramirez is still at Brookdale Hospital. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said that scooters have been used in other recent attacks and that it can be a "fairly lethal weapon, particularly if you start swinging it." more ›

A Brooklyn barbecue party became the scene for a melee involving the partiers and housing cops. The police 'shot 28 year old Robert Ramirez after he allegedly hit one of the cops with a scooter. And Ramirez, whose left lung was removed and is at Brookdale Hospital, was provoked when his stepfather, known as both Adiel Ramirez and Jose Morales, was confronted by the police. It all started when the police asked the courtyard party at the Glenwood Houses in East Flatbush to turn down the music, and then it's they said, they said. Witnesses claim that the police were roughing up Adiel Ramirez (one said, "They handcuffed him and started beating him") after asking him for ID and that his stepson stepped in defend him. However, the police say there were people smoking pot and that a DJ punched one of the officers in the face. After the younger Ramirez hit police officer with a Razor scooter, the officer shot him in the chest. The Daily News reports that a partygoer shot video on a cellphone, but the video doesn't show the police beating Adiel Ramirez or the younger Ramirez hitting the cop with a scooter. more ›

A police van speeding to the scene of a crime hit an SUV in Brooklyn, causing two children in the car to be ejected into a street in Brownsville. Six year old Diamond Nicholas is in a medically induced coma, and his ten year old brother Raven was injured seriously as well; five police officers were injured as well, though not as severely (broken knee, broken arm). Their mother, substitute teacher Pearl Nicholas, had been driving them home from school when the police van "smashed into the passenger side of Nicholas's green Jeep, sending it spinning into a lamppost and then into a chain-link fence," according to the Post; the Nicholas family says that everyone was buckled in the Jeep Cherokee. The van, on its way to help an officer in pursuit of a man with a gun, had its sirens and lights on, but the family is reportedly blaming the cops for going too fast. However, they are happy with the plainclothes officer who rushed one of the boys to Brookdale Hospital. more ›

A little girl was killed yesterday morning when her aunt's boyfriend started firing his gun after his girlfriend's relatives told him to stop drinking during his birthday weekend; he also wounded three others. Tajmere Clark, 3 or 4 years old (the NY Times and Newsday say 3, the Post and Daily News say 4), was at the apartment of her aunt Jacqueline Warren and her boyfriend, General "Bubba" Waiters, under the care of her grandmother Mary Lee Clark. Either Clark and/or two of Warren's chlidren confronted Waiters about drinking so much in front of the kids, which seemed to set him off. Waiters used a .357 Magnum to fire around the apartment, hitting Tajmere, Clark, and two of his girlfriend's children. Waiters was then tackled into an aquarium (Newsday describes he "had a bloody gash on his head from smashing into the aquarium tank and was lying on the ground surrounded by fish") and arrested by the police. Clark is at Brookdale Hospital, on life support, while Shataisha Warren is in serious condition with a leg wound and Lorenzo Warren is in stable condition. more ›