A 59-year-old addict who had just been released from rehab was fatally shot in the head during a clash inside a Queens residential building, police said Friday.
Police responding to a call of a person shot around 11:15 p.m. Thursday found Richard Brown dead inside a second-floor apartment inside the Ocean Bay Apartments, a NYCHA complex on Beach 54th St. near Arverne Blvd. in Edgemere, cops said.
Brown, whose nickname was “Homicide,” had been shot multiple times in the head, cops said.
Brown was homeless and often flopped at his friend’s place, where he was shot dead in the living room.
The witness, who called Brown his “uncle,” was in the bedroom when he heard the shots. He said that when he investigated, he found Brown dead in the living room and a 5-foot-9 heavyset Black man in a black hoodie running out of the apartment.
Brown died at the scene, cops said.
The witness was found inside the apartment the next morning, sopping up Brown’s blood from the floor.
“My uncle got killed last night,” said the friend, who wished not to be named. “He’s not like a blood relative but he’s like an uncle. I knew him since I was a baby. Over 36 years I knew that man!”
The man was cleaning up the blood to spare his family the horror of what happened.
“I’m not gonna let my family come and see that. It’s not OK what happened, but you know…” he said solemnly before getting back to his grim task.
Brown has 42 arrests on his record and did four stints in prison in the ’80s and ’90s for weapon possession, attempted robbery and assault, according to court records. In at least five of the arrests, cops charged Brown with resisting arrest, police sources said.
When he wasn’t sleeping on the couch inside the second-floor apartment, he could be found sleeping in the building’s stairwell, neighbors said.
The shooting may have begun with a struggle in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, one neighbor said.
“There was rumbling in the stairs,” the neighbor said. “Somebody was struggling in the stairs. Somebody was saying, ‘Get off of me! Get off of me!’ I was like, ‘I’m not gonna go outside to see what’s going on.’ And then after that, that’s when I heard the shots.”
Neighbors didn’t know why Brown’s nickname was “Homicide.” Out of his four prison stints, none were for murder.
“I asked him about it, once,” the neighbor said. “He didn’t tell me why.”
Instead, the woman said, “He just smiled.”
Brown was addicted to drugs and smoked crack, but had just recently taken steps to kick his habit, longtime friends said.
One friend said Brown had just returned after spending four months at an Upstate New York rehab facility before he was killed.
“He stopped doing drugs and look what happened to him,” said the 54-year-old pal, who wished not to be named. The friend, who had known Brown for more than two decades, said, “He wanted to get clean. He was tired of it.”
After rehab, “he seemed happy,” the friend said. “He was more outgoing.”
Brown, another longtime friend said, “didn’t bother nobody unless you bothered him.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said when he heard of Brown’s death.
No arrests have been made. It wasn’t immediately clear what sparked the clash.
Police on Friday were scouring the area looking for surveillance footage that could help them identify the gunman.
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