‘Pain is unbearable’
B’klyn mom mourns son after alleged shooter arrested
A Brooklyn mother is taking no comfort in the arrest of a convicted drug dealer for the shooting death of her hardworking son.
“It’s like somebody went into my soul and snatched it out of my body,” the distraught woman told the Daily News one day after the suspect was handcuffed for the shooting of Joheem Hamilton, who was just 25 and the father to a 7month-old girl.
“The pain is unbearable,” she continued Wednesday, sitting on the porch of her home. “I want justice for my son, that’s it. I want this man to go to jail for life ... For him to do this to my family is devastating. This is so hard.”
Ex-con Earl Morgan, 50, was busted Tuesday for allegedly gunning down Hamilton and wounding one of the dead man’s friends inside a Monument Walk building in Fort Greene’s Ingersoll Houses.
Morgan served state prison time for drug convictions in 1995 and 2005, public records show.
Hamilton was the antithesis of his killer. He was working at the Downtown Brooklyn Shake Shack to support his new little girl and devoting his free time to raising the infant and lending his mother a helping hand.
Morgan allegedly opened fire on Hamilton and the second victim inside the Ingersoll Houses on May 30 after Hamilton finished work at the restaurant, with both bleeding victims fleeing into an eighth-floor apartment.
“He couldn’t get home on the train because of the protest downtown for Black Lives Matter,” Morgan’s mother said of his whereabouts the night he was killed. “He would’ve been home with his daughter.”
Medics took Hamilton, shot in the stomach, to New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, but he could not be saved.
The other victim was taken to Brooklyn Hospital and survived the bullet that slammed into his back.
Police did not provide a motive for the homicide.
Just seven days later on June 7, a 30-year-old man as shot to death on Monument Walk outside the same housing development. Police have made no arrests in that case.
Hamilton’s mother credited the NYPD for closing the case, adding that investigators were checking in to see if she was OK.
“I’m not OK,” she said, sitting amid candles arranged as a memorial for her firstborn child. “My son was only 25. The person who killed him was 50. You’re twice his age. You don’t understand the pain. I feel like I’m sitting outside with my son right now. Do you know how that feels?”
The lone glimmer of light the heartbroken mother could find came in recalling her son’s bond with his newborn child.
“She doesn’t understand life yet, but she knew her father loved her,” she said. “He was an amazing dad. All he did was work and take care of his baby. That’s it.”