Mom mourns loss of two sons — 1 to drugs, the other to gunshot

She had been through this before, that unspeakable pain that burns a hole in a mother’s heart when a son is lost to the streets.

Last time, just five months ago, it was drugs, an overdose, despite a determined struggle to stay clean. This time, just last week, it was a bullet from a coward’s gun, fired through a Brooklyn barbershop window while her boy waited to get a haircut.

“It’s a lot I’ve been through,” Evelyn Selby said.

On May 5, according to police, Selby’s son, Peter McCourty, 45, was shot in the chest around 9:30 p.m. when a gunman opened fire through the window of Champion Cutz Barber Shop in Brownsville. A second customer, a 28-year-old man, was wounded in the leg, and was expected to recover, cops said.

But McCourty didn’t make it. He was rushed to Brookdale University Hospital, where he died, the second time in five months someone had given Selby awful news.

There have been no arrests.

Selby, 78, said she didn’t know anything about the barbershop (above) where her son was killed. She didn’t know if McCourty (inset) was a regular customer or if he just wandered in that day. All she knows, she said, is that he liked to look nice.

“He likes to dress and keep himself well,” she said. “New sneakers, new everything. He liked to dress.”

She said she didn’t know anything about the shooting, either.

“We don’t know what happened,” Selby said. “All we know is he got shot in the barbershop. I’m not sure who the target was.”

Selby stopped by McCourty’s Brownsville apartment on Wednesday to tidy up the place. Relatives had been by the night before to swap stories and grieve. There, they remembered a man Selby described as “a nice guy, a caring, loving person.”

“He’s a family man, a real family man,” she said.

McCourty worked driving a truck and delivering food. He loved to travel and swim.

“He wouldn’t go to a hotel and stay if they didn’t have a pool,” she said. Selby still can’t believe he’s gone.

“I was like, ‘No, not my baby,’” she recalled. “It’s something I would never want no mother to go through. He got shot in his chest. When I got to Brookdale, they already said he passed.”

Selby was already in grief. In December, her older son, Rodney Selby, 54, died of a drug overdose. She said Rodney had been clean for 18 months when some friends gave him some fentanyl, and that she didn’t know he was dead until 20 days later.

“He wasn’t getting high,” Selby said. “He was clean for a year and a half. He hadn’t touched nothing. And I guess you know how your buddies do you. He had a heart attack and they took him and put him in a truck and dumped his body on Linden Blvd.”

“All I know is they found him and I didn’t find out he was dead,” she said. “It happened on the 1st of December, and I found out on the 20th he was dead. He was missing for a while.”

In the weeks before his death, Rodney made several social media posts about being clean and sober.

Selby called out Rodney’s fake friends and the gunman who took her youngest son.

“No respect for one another, for human life,” she said. “They treat human life like animals. This guy that killed my son, he ain’t have no guts. If he was going to kill somebody, come to his face. Don’t shoot through no window. You sneaking up on a window and shooting through a window and shot my son. Come on. He ain’t got no guts. He’s not a man. He’s not even a human being.”

The cleaning distracts Selby for a while. But it’s not long before she’s angry, and sad. Always sad.

“All I do is ask God to help me to go through this,” Selby said. “I never got over Rodney. Now it’s going to be a long time. Peter’s my baby. Rodney was good, Peter was good, too.”