Bx. killer ‘destroyed my whole life’: widow

You shot my husband dead over flicked cigarette butt, cries ‘grieving, sick’ wife

life, with a stranger pumping a bullet into his torso after the 36-year-old victim unwittingly flicked a cigarette butt toward three men as the couple walked toward their Morrisania home this past Saturday.

It was a brutal ending to a love affair that began 20 years ago when the two were just teens, a guy from Long Island and a girl from the Lower East Side meeting at a community center in Brooklyn.

Now Burgos-Holley is tortured by his memory as police seek the shooter who gunned down her husband in a senseless spasm of violence — an increasingly commonplace city event in recent months.

“At night it’s the worst,” the sobbing widow told the Daily News. “Going upstairs to that apartment with his clothes, it’s the worst. It’s bad for me.”

City homicides are up 29% in 2020, with 224 murders through this past Sunday compared with 189 over the same period last year. A perplexed Burgos-Holley describes her husband’s death as particularly mindless, noting how he immediately apologized to the three youths over the flicked butt.

“He said ‘Pardon,’ and he turned around,” she recalled.

But the trio began cursing and screaming at her husband, and then stalking the couple as they walked away.

“He thought they were following us too far and so he turned around and said, ‘Yo, I said pardon myself,’ ” she recalled. One of the men then began punching Holley before the fatal bullet was fired. The dying victim ran into the street as Burgos-Holley ran after the fleeing assailants.

“I freaked out,” she recounted. “I ran toward the perpetrators and started chasing them and screaming at them.”

As the killer and his coHolley’s