CLINTON HILL, Brooklyn (WABC) — Competing gangs have put a Brooklyn neighborhood in the crosshairs of violence as the two sides duke it out in a turf war that left two asylum seekers dead on Sunday. Police are now investigating whether the gangs come from Venezuela.
In Clinton Hill, migrants from a 4,000-bed shelter nearby, fill the sidewalks.
They sit on park benches, on stoops and curbs and under the BQE overpass. The neighborhood is so crowded with people, residents feared what was coming.
“We’ve been seeing the escalation of violence on the street and in the community for months now,” one resident said.
“We’ve been pleading with the mayor as we’ve seen increased violence, that this was inevitable,” another resident said.
On Sunday night, the violence came. Two people were murdered and a third was critically injured just outside one of the two adjacent shelters in Clinton Hill. It is a neighborhood, now pleading for help.
Residents came together Tuesday night, to demand the city provide more protection for them now and move to downsize the two enormous and crowded migrant shelters in the neighborhood.
Some residents in the neighborhood are frightened now, just to go outside.
“Now it feels like that whole section is just not available to the community anymore, so are parks are no longer available — you can’t go to the parks,” one resident said.
Police say the man seen in a video is responsible for the two Sunday night murders. In the video, he appears to be putting a gun in his waistband.
Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday, didn’t offer much hope, saying police are looking at a violent Venezuelan street gang as the people behind the violence.
“They’re extremely dangerous,” he said. “We’re dealing with violent individuals that are not representative of the overwhelming number of people who are coming here as migrant asylum seekers.”
No one has yet been arrested, and that hasn’t made any residents feel safer.
Police say they know the person they are looking for; they just haven’t found him yet.
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