According to authorities, a Brooklyn bodybuilder and his stepson were shot dead in the hallway outside their apartment in an ongoing quarrel with their enraged downstairs neighbour, who invaded their house to complain about the noise.
A raged resident of the Flatbush Gardens Complex in East Flatbush shot the victim’s 47-year-old father, Bladimy Mathurin, and the victim’s 27-year-old stepson, Chin Wai Mode, in the fourth-floor corridor outside their apartment at 10:30 p.m. Sunday, according to NYPD.
“That guy killed my son, my husband,” Marie Luc Delille, 48, said from her apartment, where blood was still pooled outside the door. “That guy terrified my family. The only family I have, my husband and my children. I have nobody else.”
Delille’s small daughter witnessed the horror.
“My daughter needs therapy,” she said. “That happened in front of her.”
According to a police source, cops obtained security tape showing the shooter, who lives on the third floor of the apartment complex on Brooklyn Ave., storming upstairs to confront his neighbours for creating a disturbance.
According to investigators, the victims and their irritated neighbour got into an altercation that spilt into the hallway. According to investigators, Mathurin went into his home at one point, only to reappear a short time later carrying scissors.
The gunman then grabbed his firearm and opened fire, hitting both males in the head and back, according to authorities.
According to Delille, the argument began with the downstairs neighbour beating on the ceiling before going upstairs to confront them.
“When he banged, my husband banged back,” Delille said. “Then he feels so upset, he comes and kicks the door. My husband goes outside. That’s when he just grabbed his gun and blew my husband and blew my son.”
Delille claimed she tried to intervene before the bullets were discharged.
“I went outside,” she recounted. “I tell my husband, ‘Leave him alone. Come. Come. Get inside.’ I could hear a voice telling me, {to} get inside. When I was turning my back, he shot my husband. I didn’t know of my son. I thought my son was inside. My husband went out first. Had an argument with him. That’s when my son went out.”
Delille stated that they had previous encounters with the individual. Her neighbour, she claimed, was biased towards her family because they were Haitian.
“Haitian. Look what you did to your country,” she says the shooter said to her previously. “I be like, ‘Yeah. Haitian people give you freedom. Haitian people give Black people freedom.’”
After the shooting, the gunman took an elevator down to the lobby and fled the building heading east towards Brooklyn Ave., cops said.
From the scene, investigators collected nine.45-caliber shot casings and five bullet fragments.
Police described the gunman as a dark-skinned bald male wearing a blue jacket and tan boots.
Mathurin was the father of Delille’s three younger children. They’d been together for 19 years. Her bodybuilder spouse worked as a school bus driver and an Uber driver.
“I don’t know if I’m going to survive,” she said. “I don’t feel safe. I need safety. I need safety. I was planning to move.
Delille described her kid as kind and sociable.
“He respects people,” she said. “Everybody. He would hug you. Yesterday, I tell him, ‘Chin Wai, can you make me a soup?’”
Neighbours and family members went by the blood to console Delille and her family. Mike Felix, Mode’s biological father, was among them in attendance.
“He’s a boy who never has problems,” Felix said. “He’s a good boy. He’s not a troublemaker. He stays in the house. His mother keeps him here. He goes to school. He comes back home.”
Mode’s 10-year-old sister, Nhayalla Lister, said she saw her father and her brother’s final moments.
“The guy downstairs keeps banging every time we make noise and my dad banged back,” she said. “And then the guy came upstairs and kicked our door and then my dad came out. He confronted him. The guy had a gun and shot my brother and my dad.”
“I was inside the house when I heard the ‘pow pow,’ the gunshots,” the girl said. “And then when it stopped I looked outside and I saw my dad on the floor. I was considering where’s my brother and I looked farther and he was by the staircase.”
The Vanderveer Estates, a 59-unit privately owned complex established in the late 1940s, was once known as the Vanderveer Estates. It was Barbra Streisand’s childhood home. It was renamed more than a decade ago after being plagued by crime and poor circumstances in succeeding decades.
It is also the hometown of actor Michael K. Williams. Williams, who achieved to prominence as Omar Little, the shotgun-wielding stickup guy on “The Wire,” died in 2021 of a fentanyl overdose.
