A 37-year-old man shot dead just steps from the front door of his Brooklyn home had “a soul that warms people,” his grieving cousin told the Daily News.
Donnell Thomas was shot in the chest on Saint Johns Place near Troy Ave. in Crown Heights at about 8:10 a.m. on Sunday, police said.
Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News
Donell Thomas was fatally shot outside a Saint John’s Place building in Brooklyn on Sept. 1, 2024. Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News)
On Monday, friends and family gathered around a memorial of mostly red candles and balloons set up where Thomas was shot, next door to his home. A poster board above the candles read “Forever in our hearts.”
“We all here. He’s loved. Very loved. Across the street, you see all these people standing there … He’s loved,” Thomas’ 37-year-old cousin, who wished not to be named, told The News.
She last saw her cousin at a family barbecue shortly before he died.
“You see my eyes? I haven’t eaten in two days,” she said, “A piece of me is gone.”
After hearing a gunshot “I came out and I saw what I think is a dead body and a group of guys trying to call for police,” a neighbor told The News on Sunday. “People were hysterical and in shock.”
“I know him since I was a kid. I been living on this block since the ’90s. When I moved on this block, this building wasn’t even here,” a 39-year-old man who said he was Thomas’ best friend told The News.
He described Thomas as “a loving person” who was always there for him.
“He was different, man,” he said. “This s—t hurts.”
There were no immediate arrests and the investigation remains ongoing, police said.
The killing took place around the corner from the site of a Jan. 24 homicide in which 37-year-old Barrington Howell was knifed to death by a mugger on Sterling Place near Schenectady Ave. Cops arrested Jamel Miles, 34, and charged him in the slaying.
The shooting marks the eighth homicide in the 77th Precinct this year. The precinct saw seven slayings in all of 2023.
