Con’s death tool Freed killer used screwdriver in B’klyn slay: cops
Shot in head outside deli on West Side
An ex-con who did time in prison for killing someone 25 years ago has now been charged with using a screwdriver to fatally stab a Good Samaritan trying to break up a fight outside a Brooklyn gambling den, police said Monday.
William Smith, 45, of Brownsville, is charged with murder for allegedly killing Yong Zheng, 46, during the wild melee in Sunset Park Friday night.
Smith, caught on surveillance video wearing a black hoodie with a smiley face on it during the slay, confessed to the murder, a police source said.
He was taken into custody early Saturday in Bushwick after police tracked his white Mercedes-Benz there. A witness took a picture of the license plate and gave it to police, the source said. Cops charged Smith with the murder Sunday evening.
“I want them all arrested, I want them to be executed,” Zheng’s wife Jin Zhao, 39, said of the attackers Sunday, as her 4-year-old son wiped tears from her face. “Every time I look at my son, I think about the fact that he has no father.”
Smith has 13 prior arrests on his record, most recently for DWI in 2010 and selling drugs in 2007.
In 1996 he was arrested for murder, police said. He was ultimately convicted of manslaughter and weapon possession, records show, and sentenced to five to 15 years in prison. He was conditionally released by parole in February 2006.
“We were all furious this morning,” close family friend Xiu Lin, who was with Zheng the night he was killed, said Monday after learning of the arrest. She wished Smith had never been released after his manslaughter conviction.
“The system is so broken,” she said. “Why did they even let this guy go back on the street?”
Zheng was returning from dinner with friends around 9:30 p.m. when he stumbled upon two groups of men battling near Seventh Ave. and 57th St., police said.
Zheng rushed into the fray and tried to defuse the fight, which had spilled onto the sidewalk after Smith and at least two accomplices robbed an illegal gambling den on 58th St.
The victims chased the robbers, sparking a bloody brawl in which Smith whipped out a screwdriver and his accomplices also attacked the victims with blades.
Video obtained by the Daily News shows Zheng dashing across the street to intervene and then stumbling back, gushing blood across the sidewalk and being supported by a woman before collapsing. He was stabbed four times in the chest by Smith with the screwdriver, according to cops.
Zheng’s friend Xiong Lin, who had just had dinner with Zheng, also tried to intervene in the brawl but walked away with minor wounds. Friends say Zheng suspected he was witnessing a hate crime against fellow Asians when he jumped into the fray.
Two victims of the robbery who chased the crooks were wounded: a 39-year-old man knifed twice in the arm and once in the chest and a 42-year-old man stabbed in the lower back, police said. They were taken to NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn, where Zheng died, police said.
Zheng, who worked as a bus driver before the COVID pandemic and was the sole provider for his wife and two children, recently moved his family to Philadelphia because he feared they would contract coronavirus in New York.
Smith was charged with robbery and assault in addition to murder. His accomplices are still being sought.
An Upper West Side man was shot in the head outside a neighborhood deli, leaving him clinging to life and his family in shock, police and relatives said Monday.
Shots rang out outside the King Columbus Deli (photo) on Columbus Ave. near W. 104th St. about 11:40 p.m. Sunday, cops said. Family members identified the wounded victim as Ousmane Niambele, 20.
He was rushed to Mount Sinai St. Luke’s, where he remained in critical condition Monday, his mother, Nana Niambele, told the Daily News.
Police said Niambele was also carrying a gun.
“I don’t have no idea where my son would get a gun, the distraught mother, a nurse, told The News, calling her son’s injuries “bad.”
The mother said the family is from Mali. Both Ousmane and his mother live on W. 101st St., about four blocks from where the young man was attacked.
“Everybody over there [in Mali] is praying for him, the whole family,” she said. “We are praying he makes it.”
According to the mom, when police called with news of her son’s shooting, “I couldn’t believe it. I checked his room and he was gone. I thought he was sleeping.”
An employee at the deli told The News that Niambele had “ordered his food and went outside to wait.”
But then the worker said he saw “a car on a corner of the street. [A man inside the car] had a gun and they shot him in the head.”
He said he wasn’t sure if the victim ever fired any shots. “They were waiting for him,” the employee said.
The young shooting victim has prior arrests on charges including robbery, strangulation and drug possession, police sources said.
“He was working at UPS for the holidays and they were going to hire him,” Niambele’s mother told The News. “But COVID ended that. I don’t know why anyone would shoot him. He’s got no enemies.”
The assailant is still being sought.