Dad gunned down
‘Living in projects is hard,’ says cousin in B’klyn
A young dad gunned down on a Brooklyn street steps from home had just spoken to loved ones when relatives answered a pounding on the door minutes after an “out of nowhere” attack, grieving family members said Sunday.
“I was on the phone with him, we were talking about watching the basketball game,” Lavon Mallory, 32, recalled of the moments before Isaiah Bowman, 25, was fatally shot Friday. “Regular jokes. He on his way home from work, we was talking about making bets on FanDuel for the game, chilling, having a good time and out of nowhere this happened.”
Bowman was at E. 108th St. near Glenwood Road in Canarsie about 8:15 p.m. Friday when a gunman stormed up and shot him at point-blank range during a clash outside the Breukelen Houses, a NYCHA complex, police said.
Just a few minutes after hanging up the phone, Mallory said he got a panicked call from his sister, who told him there’d been a shooting on the corner.
“Five seconds after I get off the phone with her, his [Bowman’s] friend’s mom comes banging on the door saying he was just shot. So I went downstairs and I see the whole commotion,” said Mallory. “It was probably just over some petty s--t. There’s no playing fair in the streets now.”
As word trickled through the community, Shadrea Singleton ran down to the street to find her “favorite cousin” mortally wounded on the pavement. Singleton lives with Mallory.
“I’m screaming, ‘That’s my cousin, that’s my cousin,’ ” Singleton, 28, told the Daily News. “We were all losing our minds out there. They just kept pushing us back.”
Bowman was shot once in the chest. Medics rushed him to Brookdale University Hospital, but he could not be saved.
The father of a preschooler was on his way home from a construction site on Long Island where he worked with his uncle when the chaos erupted, Singleton said.
“He was well-loved, he was a standup guy,” Mallory told The News. “He would do anything, he was so loyal. He loved basketball.”
“My cousin was so sweet,” Singleton added. “If he had his last dollar, he’d give it to you. He’d give you his arm if he had to. That’s how my cousin was.”
The couple struggled to think of a person who may have wanted to hurt Bowman.
“He’d go outside, do what he have to do, go to work, come home, he was playing in a basketball tournament in the park,” said Mallory. “He didn’t have beefs with nobody.”
“He wasn’t somebody that was a loser in the streets and had a whole bunch of beefs, he was friends with everybody,” he continued. “If it makes sense, even the people he wasn’t friend with, he was friends with.”
Bowman was the father of a 4-year-old girl.
“How can you break that down to a 4-year-old that you’re not gonna see your father anymore?” Singleton asked. “That’s a hard thing to do.”
As of last Sunday, there were 14 shooting victims in Canarsie’s 69th Precinct this year, up from 13 at the same time last year, according to the most recent NYPD data.
“Living in projects period is hard,” Singleton said. “It’s scary to wake up not knowing what’s going to happen to you, if you’re going to make it back home or not.
“If you’re going to make it to see another day. We just gotta do better with the gun violence.”
Police are still working to track down Bowman’s shooter.
“This has got to stop,” the rattled woman said. “We have kids we want to see grow up to become young men, young women. It’s scary to even sit downstairs in front of the building with my son.”