A 45-year-old man shot and killed in Brooklyn was a beloved father to three, including a 16-year-old boy who “needs his dad,” the victim’s devastated sister said.
Gamaliel Oliver showed up at Brookdale University Hospital just after 2:35 p.m. Wednesday with a gunshot wound to his abdomen, police said.
Police were initially unsure when and where Oliver was shot, but later determined he was gunned down on E. 98th St. near Lenox Road in East Flatbush about an hour before he arrived at the hospital by private means.
Once Oliver’s sister in Georgia heard the news of his death, she got in the car and raced to New York with her family.
“The first phone call his daughter, my niece, told me that he was shot in his stomach and that he was in surgery,” said Toya Oliver, 38. “And then, within almost 10 minutes later, I got a call back saying that he died.”
Oliver was born and raised in Brownsville alongside his sister, who eventually moved south.
Gamaliel Oliver, 45. (Facebook)
“It’s a mess,” said Toya Oliver. “I don’t even know what happened. He had nieces and nephews. He had a huge family.”
The slain man was the father to an 8-year-old girl, a 16-year-old boy and a 21-year-old woman.
“They understand but at the end of the day you know it’s tough, they still have to grow up without a dad,” said Toya Oliver. “They’ll be going to school and hear everybody else talking about their dad [and] they have to be without their dad.”
Oliver and his sister grew up with an absent father, a role the man helped fill in their childhood home.
“He was an amazing brother,” Toya Oliver recalled. “If I call, if I need something or the kids need something, as long as he got it, you got it.”
Police have made no arrests in the slaying.
“I want him to feel like how my mother would have felt or how we feel,” Toya Oliver said of the gunman. “My nephew is 16 right now, an age that he needs his dad, where he’s learning to become a man [and] he’s got to do without his dad. So yeah I want to know why? How?
“I tell everybody I’m gonna be okay but these kids cannot survive on their own,” she added. “They need strength, they need support, they need love. Right now, for me that’s all I can do right now.”
The man’s sister described him as a stylish and loving uncle to her children who loved to dress up and travel.
“He was very much loved,” said Toya Oliver. “My brother was good, he was kind, he was caring. He took care of everybody.”
Despite Oliver’s death, shootings are down in the NYPD’s 67th Precinct, which covers East Flatbush and Remsen Village.
So far this year, police have responded to five shootings in the neighborhoods as of April 14. The figure is a 50% decrease from the same time last year, when cops had already raced to 10 shootings, according to the most recent NYPD data.
Homicides in the precinct have stayed flat, with five victims so far this year. The first few months of 2023 saw the same number of murder victims.
