Police are searching for a gunman who killed a teenager and wounded another man in Flatbush on Wednesday afternoon.
Surveillance video released by the NYPD shows the shooter firing off multiple rounds from inside the driver’s seat of a silver BMW at the corner of Woodruff and Ocean avenues at around 3:30 pm — striking the 18-year-old in the chest and arms, and hitting a 33-year-old man in the abdomen.
First responders arrived on the scene and took both victims to Kings County Hospital, where doctors pronounced the teen dead. The older victim is in stable condition, and is expected to recover, according to authorities.
Immediately after the shooting, police say the shooter — who stands 5-feet 8-inches tall — fled southbound on Ocean Avenue in the vehicle, which had its license plates removed.
The shooting is just the latest in a substantial uptick in gun violence across Brooklyn, where police have recorded 457 shooting victims this year as of Aug. 18, compared with just 234 during the same timeframe in 2019.
The 70th Police Precinct, where Wednesday’s Flatbush shooting occurred, has seen more than a 271 percent increase in victims of gun violence year-over-year — from just seven last year to 26 thus far in 2020.
In an effort to combat the uptick in shootings — which has plagued all Five Boroughs, but has hit Brooklyn particularly hard — District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced on Wednesday the creation of a “new Gun Violence Suppression Bureau” that will dedicate additional resources to rooting out high-volume perpetrators of violent crime.
Distraught passersby on Wednesday remarked on the teen’s tragic death, and wondered when the scourge of bloody violence would stop.
“This neighborhood is becoming a shooting gallery,” one resident commented. “Why won’t it just stop?”
