By Andy Newman, The New York Times
The shooting of three men in an elevator in a Coney Island housing project on Sunday appeared to be related to both drugs and gangs, the police said yesterday. All three men had criminal records and were shot in the head, suggesting they had been singled out for execution-style killing, a law enforcement official said.
One died immediately, and the other two were considered unlikely to survive, the authorities said.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly made the link to drugs and gangs at a news conference yesterday, saying that one of the victims wore red shoelaces, a sign of affiliation with the Bloods.
One of the injured men, Aaron Granton, also known as Ebay, was a drug dealer, one of his relatives said. But relatives of the other two - Robert Vaughn, who died, and his younger brother Isaiah Holmes - said that they had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Mr. Holmes, who relatives said is 19, was in critical condition at Lutheran Medical Center last night. Mr. Granton, who relatives said is 27 or 28 years old, was also in critical condition, at Coney Island Hospital.
The shooting Sunday night reverberated through the Surfside Gardens in Brooklyn, one of the tall brick city housing complexes that dominate the Coney Island waterfront west of the boardwalk amusements.
Around 7:30 p.m., the police said, residents of the third floor of the Surfside Gardens building at 2940-42 West 31st Street heard shots and found three men lying in the elevator bleeding. Mr. Vaughn, 23, of Flatlands, was pronounced dead at the scene.
No one was arrested.
Venett Stukes, 50, who said she was related to Mr. Granton by marriage, said yesterday that she believed Mr. Granton was involved in drug dealing. She thought he had gone to the building to visit his girlfriend.
Relatives of Mr. Vaughn and Mr. Holmes said that they were simply there to visit friends. “They’re innocent,” said Barkim Robinson, 40, a cousin of the two. “They had nothing to do with drugs.”
The wavelet of renewal that accompanied the building of the KeySpan Park minor-league baseball stadium in Coney Island has not reached the cluster of housing projects, which include what the police and residents say are some of the toughest in the city.
Surfside Gardens, a three-building complex near the corner of Mermaid Avenue and West 31st Street, is not one of the rougher ones. “Surfside is one of the more quiet ones,” said Inspector Charles Scholl, the commanding officer of the 60th Precinct, which covers the project. Police statistics show about a dozen violent crimes a year at Surfside the past three years.
From the outside, the building at 2940-42 West 31st Street is a clean U-shaped structure with a well-maintained miniature lighthouse outside. The building, residents noted, is home to one of the city’s most promising high school basketball prospects, Sebastian Telfair, and the former home of Stephon Marbury, a member of the Knicks who honed his skills on the courts outside.
Inside, though, an anti-graffiti sign in the lobby is itself graffitied over, and another sign warns in capital letters that riding on the outsides of elevators is dangerous and deadly.
On the third floor, the elevator door opens onto the ominous sight of a “1" painted next to the “3,” making 13. But if the floor is frequented by gang members, the graffiti there offer no clues. “Briona Do Not Like Snoop” is written on the wall opposite the elevator, a few inches away from streaks of dried blood.
Yesterday all was silent on the third-floor hallway. “I didn’t hear nothing,” said a young woman coming out of an apartment.
“My mom didn’t see anything; she just stayed inside,” said a teenage girl on her way into a different apartment on the floor.
In front of the building, several men who appeared to be detectives were trying to coax a young man in a blue parka into accompanying them to a station house. “We just want to ask you some questions,” a man in a suit said to him.
“I ain’t going nowhere,” the young man said. “I don’t know nothing. I don’t know none of the people involved.”
The man in the suit said something about a parole officer. More officers in uniform emerged and surrounded the young man. Finally he agreed to get into the car.
But by late afternoon, the investigation had borne little fruit. “We have a few little leads,” Inspector Scholl said. “Nothing major.”