Slay vic didn’t ‘know how to come home’
‘In search of good time,’ killed after party
The fatal bullet sounded just like a firecracker, barely audible above the blaring music of a Memorial Day weekend party honoring a friend lost too soon.
Alfred Bent was among the guests celebrating the lost soul when he became one himself, killed by a bullet to the head from a Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, gunman after paying his respects and heading for home, his heartbroken pals told the Daily News.
“Right now, I’m speechless,” said Courtnee Pierson, 39, who lived with Bent and was the mother of his namesake 8-yearold son. “It’s just that it makes no sense at all, to go to that extent for whatever the argument was . ... I don’t know anything.”
After the 55-year-old Bent departed, party guests heard what “sounded like a firecracker,” recalled one party guest. “But no one was paying attention because we was just partying . ... Nobody knew.”
Bent was down the block when he was executed on Decatur St. near Malcolm X Blvd., just before 11:30 p.m. on Saturday. His body was found sprawled on the ground after a 911 call of shots fired, and he died a short time later at Kings County Hospital.
A makeshift memorial reading “RIP Alfred MY BROTHER” stood near the spot where he fell.
Bent, who used to live on Decatur St., had a 24-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son, his loved ones said.
Pierson, the mother of Bent’s son, Jordan, recalled begging him to head straight home after dropping her daughter off at a relative’s place earlier Saturday.
They lived together and raised their son together, but did not share a romantic relationship, she said.
“I always say that, ’cause he don’t know how to come home,” she said. “He [goes] out and he was always in search of a good time. He loved it. I didn’t know that he was going to Decatur. He didn’t tell me.”
Pierson said she called Bent just before 9:30 p.m., heard the music from the party in the background, and pleaded with him to come home early because they had plans to take her mother food shopping Sunday morning.
“He said, ‘I be home soon,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Your soon is tomorrow. I need you to come home now.’ He said, ‘I’m coming soon, soon, soon.’ And I’m like, ‘Mmmmm.’ And that was it.”
The next call came from a friend of her mother on Decatur St., letting her know that Bent was shot.
“I couldn’t believe it, so right after I hung up with her I called his phone. His phone rang out. At that point I just felt all the air in my body left,” she said. She headed to the hospital, and learned Bent had died.
Pierson had the gut-wrenching duty of telling Jordan his father was dead. The little boy, she said, was “a spitting image” of his dad, who was killed outside the building where his daughter lived.
“It was the worst moment of my life,” she said. “Even though he always wanted to try to do more financially, he always made time for Jordan. They’d go fishing at Canarsie Pier.”
Bent was a mechanic and recently started working with a company that contracts with the city Transportation Department, Pierson said. His pals said he loved restoring vehicles.
“My heart is broken. I can’t believe you’re gone,” Bent’s younger sister Crystal Bent wrote on Facebook after his death. “Why people are so evil? I’m going to miss my big brother.”
Cops have made no arrests in the shooting. Pierson said she heard from detectives that he was involved in an “altercation” before the shooting, but she didn’t know the details of what happened.
As far as she knew, he had no enemies.
“I tell you, [he’s] the most sweetest, most helping soul you had ever met,” she said.
“He was my life. He was my confidant. Just say he was the love of my life — he was. We was just like peanut butter and jelly.”