4-month slay-free stretch in B’klyn nabe ends

THE FATAL shooting of a 37-year-old man Sunday ended a four-month, murder-free stretch in East New York — a Brooklyn neighborhood where the yearly homicide rate in the early 1990s regularly exceeded 100.

Jahimel Gayle, was shot in the neck by his younger brother inside their apartment on Hendrix St. near Sutter Ave. about noon, police said. He died in his home.

The fatal shooting marked the 75th Precinct’s first homicide of the year.

Cops took Jahmorley Gayle, 32, into custody a short time later and police recovered the gun, authorities said. He’s charged with murder.

Police wouldn’t say what the brothers quarreled over Sunday.

Three decades ago, cops in East New York could hardly imagine four months passing without the precinct logging a single murder.

In 1993, at the beginning of the modern CompStat era, 126 people were killed within the precinct’s borders — breaking a then-20-year-old city record. That year, cops citywide investigated 1,927 homicides, according to NYPD data.

In East New York, the murder rate began to steadily decline during the years that followed, dropping to 35 homicides by 1997.

In 2017, two decades later, cops in the 75th Precinct investigated 11 murders for the entire year.

On Sunday, relatives consoled one another outside the building where Gayle died.

Neighbors shook their heads in disappointment when they learned his death had broken the murder-free spell, which The New York Times reported Friday.

“It’s been a lot better lately. This is the first murder in 2018. It’s sad. It’s always sad. This is why I keep my children with me and never let them out of sight,” said a 44-year-old father of three.

Another neighbor said she’d noticed the area had become much safer.

“We kind of didn’t want to talk about it, because we didn’t want to jinx it,” said Betty, 47. “There was even an article in The New York Times saying this used to be the ‘Four Corners of Death.’ I was thanking God and cops on social (media). I spoke too soon.”

Teofilo Colon, 43, remembered when the 75th Precinct “used to have the highest homicides. I grew up here. It’s not that way anymore. It’s making a turn for the best,” he said.

“It was rough. It’s changed a lot in the last decade.

There have been 65 murders citywide this year through April 15 — a 17% drop from the corresponding period last year, when there were 78.

There have been 163 shooting incidents, which represents an 8% drop from the previous year, which saw 177 for the same period.

In 2017, cops investigated fewer than 300 homicides — a low the NYPD hadn’t seen in 70 years, officials said.