‘He finally met his fate’
Vic of ’15 McD’s beating ‘really sad’ his attacker slain
A Good Samaritan brutally beaten when he tried to break up a 2015 fight at a Brooklyn McDonald’s was stunned that his young attacker was fatally shot at the same restaurant last week.
“Finally he met the wrong person. That’s what it sounds like. He finally met his fate,” Iver Whittingham, 48, said of 23-year-old Kendale Hamilton’s shooting death. “That’s really sad, he didn’t learn from the first incident. That’s beyond crazy.”
Whittingham is still haunted by the cruel beating he suffered at the McDonald’s on Flatbush Ave. at Fulton St. in Fort Greene on May 14, 2015.
He told the Daily News he fled Brooklyn and moved to Long Island because the attacker and his friends tormented him long after the attack — and bought two shotguns because he was afraid they’d come knocking.
Learning of Hamilton’s slaying, Whittingham gasped, “You gotta be kidding me. That’s impossible, the chances of that.”
According to police, Hamilton got into a fistfight last Thursday with another man at the Fort Greene McDonald’s, and when the fight spilled out onto the sidewalk, both men drew guns. Hamilton was fatally struck in the shoulder and back of the head.
More than five years earlier, Whittingham encountered Hamilton at the same McDonald’s.
He recalled he was volunteering for an event for the support group “Battered 2 Beautiful,” and when he walked into the fast-food restaurant to pick up food for a friend, he saw one teenage girl beating another inside.
“She was just a kid, like the girl that was getting beat up,” he said of his own daughter at the time. “They did warn me, they said, ‘Stop trying to break it up or we’re gonna beat your ass.’ I guess it was an initiation for one of the girls. Someone was videotaping.”
Hamilton and a group of other teens beat him for intervening, and when Whittingham tried to stop the fight again, Hamilton (inset) pummeled him and chased him out of the store, Whittingham said.
Afterward, Whittingham said, he kept running into the teens — and was beaten up twice more. He said he sought help from the Brooklyn district attorney’s office to apply to the Safe Horizon victim services program, but was rebuffed.
“When the new video game comes out, they’ll forget all about you,” one of the prosecutors told him, he recalled.
“And she was so wrong. It came to the point where I had to separate from my family and live in this basement. All she had to do was put me in” Safe Horizon, Whittingham lamented.
He wound up moving to a basement apartment in Suffolk County, and got a six-figure settlement from McDonald’s after alleging in a lawsuit that security did nothing to help him, he said.
“I was really messed up. I got hit in the head several times, and right now I’m suffering from shortterm memory [loss], my leg swells up,” he said. “My foot got hit, I think from the table, and there’s a bone that’s protruding out and it really hurts. I have to get it shaved down, I need surgery.”
Whittingham shared Hamilton’s mother’s opinion that the fast-food location needs to be shut down.
“That’s a troubled place. It’s constantly going on there, it’s like a gang wormhole,” he said. “McDonald’s knows it’s happening, but they’re in a very good spot, they’re making a lot of money there.”
Hamilton’s mother, Lesley Hamilton, told The News on Monday she knew very little about the circumstances of her son’s slaying, or why he was hanging out at that McDonald’s when he lived nearly 7 miles away in East New York.
She said the killing left her shattered. “My whole life has been taken away from me,” she said.
Whittingham wondered aloud if Hamilton’s mother knew what he was up to, then suggested,, “She was oblivious. I really feel for her on that part.”
“And I’d like to tell her that time heals all wounds,” he said. “I just hope that she can come out of it. I’m so sorry for her.”