“They are out here playing Call of Duty, but there is no reset button when you take someone’s life,” boomed activist Danny Goodine, in light of a Bed Stuy woman and her pitbull killed in a crossfire shooting in a Brooklyn bodega.
At about 9:45 p.m. on Sunday, the second day of January, 2022, police responded to a 911 call of a woman shot inside the Salim Smoke Shop & Lottery Corp, 488 Dekalb Avenue, Clinton Hill. Reports say that the gunman was aiming at another man when he hit Jennifer Ynoa, 36, in the torso and her pitbull. When cops arrived she was laid out on the sidewalk “unconscious and unresponsive.” EMS responded and took Ynoa to Brooklyn Hospital where she was pronounced deceased.
“These shooters are not trained with weapons, and they shoot recklessly. As the old folk say, ‘These bullets don’t have eyes,’” said Goodine, co-founder of Men Elevating Leadership, named for his son Blake Shamel Harper, a 2004 gun violence victim.
“This young woman wasn’t the intended target, she was an innocent bystander. The dog probably lunged at him. With the ASPCA and PETA, they are going to give him more time because of the dog. But, he didn’t care who he shot. People like this have no understanding of what firearms are. There is a real consequence to their reckless behavior.”
No arrests have been made and the investigation is ongoing, and PETA has offered a $5,000 reward.
Twenty-two-year NYPD veteran, retired captain, now New York City’s 110th mayor, Eric Adams, is faced with twindemic issues of gun violence and police/community relations.
The self-described “Get Stuff Done” mayor was confronted with the gun crime issue on day one, when a bullet hit a sleeping officer in the police parking lot of East Harlem’s 25th Precinct. Deciding to sleep in his vehicle as he was due to return to work within hours, Officer Keith Wagenhauser, 33, was asleep in his personal vehicle when he was woken by a bullet shattering his window and hitting him in the head. The NYPD stated that it is not known if he was the intended target, nor where the shot came from.
The next day across the city, Ynoa and her dog were shot to death.
On Sunday, Adams and new Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell hosted a roundtable with families who have lost loved ones to gun violence. As families clutching framed photographs of their loved ones told of their ongoing trauma, Adams vowed to address the bloody gun violence, including bringing back the notorious and controversial Anti-Crime Unit. It would be reformed, he said, but critics of the unit disbanded amidst the George Floyd protests in 2021, are not going to be easily persuaded. Memories of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell and other police killings inform an opinion probably not up for debate, despite Adams’ statement that the unit will be reformed, with no room for rogue cops, transparency, and, “We’re not going to do anything in secret.”