Call it the house of blood.
A two-family home on Avenue K between E. 102nd and E. 103rd streets that hosted a brutal murder at the end of August was again teeming with gunsmoke on Sept. 3 as one of the alleged killers in the earlier slaying was gunned down on the front porch — just hours after he went to testify against two men arrested for the first crime.
Police sources said that the homeowner — who was not named — rented out rooms to two friends. After he was shot in the head inside the home because of an owed debt, his friends remained.
One of them, 24-year-old Charles Wynn, was shot in the head at 10:04 pm on Sept. 3, said police.
Sources said that Wynn had fingered two people for his landlord’s death. On the day he was killed, he went to court to testify to a grand jury, but prosecutors wouldn’t put him on the stand because of his own shady past.
Charges against the landlord’s killers are still pending, although sources believe they will be set free now that the one witness has been killed.
Wynn’s killer remained at large by late Tuesday, investigators said.
Besides being inexorably linked to each other, there’s one common denominator between them — the violence was sparked when the owner, who was killed on Aug. 31, turned his home into illegal single-room rentals to help pay the mortgage.
“People are illegally renting out rooms in their homes to people they don’t know,” one police source told this paper, adding that the victims and the killers sought in the nine homicides to hit Canarsie this year were recent additions to the neighborhood. “The homeowner is in a bind and they’re renting pieces of their homes to not the most credible people.”
Yet the slayings were just two of nine killings that made this summer one of the bloodiest on record for Canarsie. Other acts of violence included:
• A thug opened fire on man at the corner of Remsen and Foster avenues at 7:30 pm on Sept. 3. The victim was left with non life-threatening injuries that were treated at an area hospital.
• A gunman opened fire at the corner of Rockaway Parkway and Seaview Avenue on Aug. 29 in a rare daytime shooting. The victim told police he was shot near the corner at 11 am, although his injury was not life threatening. This is the second shooting to take place in this area in August, the first being on Aug. 1.
• Thieves forced their way into an address near the corner of E. 83rd Street and Glenwood Road on Aug. 25 and robbed the homeowner inside. The resident was injured, but not seriously and police believe the thieves knew their victim.
• A man was stabbed to death on Flatlands Avenue on Aug. 16 during a scrape with an unidentified assailant.
• A 60-year-old plumber was killed when he confronted two thieves who entered his home on Avenue K near Church Lane on July 29.
Despite the dearth of death and bloodshed, Deputy Inspector Milt Marmara, the commanding officer of the 69th Precinct, does not see these incidents as signs of a larger problem, even though he says he’s ordered additional patrols along Avenue K as the investigation into the two linked murders continue.
“There is nothing symptomatic about the recent spike in violence,” Marmara said. “With the exception of what happened on Avenue K, none of them are related and overall crime continues to be down.”
“The problem is we’re getting a lot of bad guys from other precincts,” he added.
