‘DON’T KILL ME’
Cab ambush vic made haunting post hrs. before
A Brooklyn man gunned down while riding in a cab wrote an ominous message on Facebook hours before he was killed.
Tracey Washington, 21, was ambushed Monday around 6:10 p.m. in Crown Heights by a gunman who waited for him as the cab pulled up on Dean St. near Schenectady Ave., sources said.
Just nine hours before that deadly confrontation, Washington posted on Facebook how he was going to start a new gig the next day — and pleaded: “Plz don’t kill me.”
“Oh yea I got the job I start tomorrow construction plz don’t kill me,” he wrote.
His grandmother, Maybell Washington, 71, told the Daily News her grandson had already left their Bedford-Stuyvesant home and was in the cab when he got a phone call that altered his evening plans.
The devastated grandmother — who raised Washington and his twin sister after their mother died while giving birth to them — said Washington decided to reroute and go to Weeksville after taking the call, referring to the Brooklyn neighborhood that borders Crown Heights.
“He got a call and he went to Weeksville,” said Maybell Washington, who learned about the call from people who know Washington. “He wasn’t [originally] going to Weeksville, where he was killed at. He was going somewhere else.”
“I don’t know where he was going,” she added. “He had just left the house. His sister said she heard him leave out the door about 6 o’clock.”
“Someone set up my child,” she said.
Washington, a basketball player who graduated from the Eagle Academy for Young Men II in Brooklyn, was supposed to begin working at the construction job in Far Rockaway, Queens, on Tuesday morning, his grandmother said.
His twin sister, Stacey Washington, said she could not imagine anyone wanting to hurt her brother.
“He was a good person,” she said. “I just feel like, who would do this? Everyone knew him. … I just wanna know who did it.”
Washington’s mysterious Facebook post was shared more than 1,200 times in the wake of his death.
“I have so many questions this is sad,” wrote one commenter, Deja Wallace.
Friends of the victim were left reeling.
“My heart breaks,” wrote Marin Sparky, the parent of a friend of Washington’s, who shared an old basketball team photo of Washington and his twin sister. “R.I.P. my angel.”
Ibrhahim Jalloh, the cabbie who drove Washington to Crown Heights the night of his death, described the horrifying ordeal to the Daily News.
“I just dropped him off and heard the shots. I saw the bullets go into his body,” said Jalloh, whose blue Toyota Highlander was riddled with bullets. “I thought I was going to die. I don’t know the guy. I just picked him up.”