OUT OF ‘HIS WORLD’
Peaceful S.I. man, 22, latest vic of city shooting spree
A 22-year-old man who loved basketball and music was fatally shot on Staten Island, police and relatives said Sunday.
Joseph Evans was standing on Cebra Ave. near Victory Blvd. in Tompkinsville when the gunman walked up and opened fire without warning about 4:50 p.m. Saturday, police said. Evans was struck in the head, back and arm.
First responders rushed Evans to Richmond University Medical Center, where he died at 8:35 p.m., police said.
“[He was] cool. He was his own person, his own world,” the victim’s brother Tysheem Burns, 28, told the Daily News, choking up as he stood over a pool of his younger brother’s blood at the crime scene Sunday morning.
“He was one of those people, he didn’t bother people. He was just trying to create his own little world.”
Burns remembered how much his younger brother, who lived with his mother three blocks from where he was shot, loved to play basketball and listen to music.
“That’s why I’m standing here apart and just in awe right now. This is my brother, my biological brother,” said Burns, who just moved back to the city after a stint in Atlanta and was reconnecting with the victim. “I don’t know whether to be at peace or at war.”
Blood stained the snow and bullet holes riddled nearby stores and cars. The gunman ran off and has not been caught.
“I thought someone threw a stone through the window,” said local bodega owner, Azharul Abadin, 39, who watched his store window shatter as shots popped off. “This is the first time I see a bullet.”
Other business owners were afraid the violence was a sign to come, as gunplay has spiked across the city in 2020.
“It messes up business,” said barber shop owner Danny
Rodriguez, 33. “People get nervous, they don’t wanna come out. On top of COVID, now this?”
“I see the cops run up the block. I saw the kid on the floor,” Rodriguez added. “He was in pain. I felt bad. It’s sad, man.”
There have been 1,799 people shot citywide this year as of Dec. 13, compared with 885 during same time period last year, a 103% surge. Homicides are up 39%, with 432 slayings citywide compared with 311 by this time last year.
Homicides in the 120th Precinct, where Evans was killed, are up a staggering 400% this year as of Dec. 13 with 10 people killed compared with two during the same time span last year. Shootings in the area are up 100% with 22 people shot so far this year compared with 11 people by this time last year.
A mile and a half from where Evans was shot, Sue Doe, 52, a mother of two, was killed in front of her adult son on Nov. 16 by a stray bullet.
Doe was standing in the lobby of a building on Park Hill Ave. near Sobel Court when a gunman in a car open fired.