Father, stepson shot dead by neighbour over noise in apartment building

• Posted on November 2, 2023November 2, 2023
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

A Brooklyn bodybuilder and his stepson were shot dead in the hallway outside their apartment in an ongoing dispute with their angry downstairs neighbor who stormed their home to complain about the noise, police said Monday.
The furious resident of the Flatbush Gardens Complex in East Flatbush shot the 47-year-old dad, Bladimy Mathurin, and the victim’s 27-year-old stepson, Chin Wai Mode, in the fourth-floor hallway outside their apartment around 10:30 p.m. Sunday, cops said.

“That guy killed my son, my husband,” Marie Luc Delille, 48, said from her apartment, where blood was still pooled outside the door. “That guy terrified my family. The only family I have, my husband and my children. I have nobody else.”

Delille’s young daughter witnessed the horror.

“My daughter needs therapy,” she said. “That happened in front of her.”

Cops recovered surveillance footage that shows the gunman, who resides on the third floor of the apartment complex on Brooklyn Ave., storm upstairs to confront his neighbors for making a racket, according to a police source.

An argument ensued between the victims and their disgruntled neighbor that spilled into the hallway, cops said. At one point, Mathurin retreated back into his home, only to emerge a short time later wielding scissors, according to police.

That’s when the gunman drew a weapon and unleashed a barrage of gunfire, striking both men in the head and back, cops said.

Delille said the dispute started with the downstairs neighbor banging on the ceiling before coming upstairs to confront them.

“When he banged, my husband banged back,” Delille said. “Then he feels so upset, he comes and kicks the door. My husband goes outside. That’s when he just grab his gun and blew my husband and blew my son.”

Before the shots were fired, Delille said she tried to intercede.

“I went outside,” she recounted. “I tell my husband, ‘Leave him alone. Come. Come. Get inside.’ I could hear a voice telling me, get inside. When I was turning my back, he shot my husband. I didn’t know of my son. I thought my son was inside. My husband went out first. Had an argument with him. That’s when my son went out.”

Delille said they had had run-ins with the man before. She said the neighbor was prejudiced against her family because they are Haitian.

“Haitian. Look what you did to your country,” she says the shooter said to her previously. “I be like, ‘Yeah. Haitian people give you freedom. Haitian people give Black people freedom.’”

After the shooting, the gunman took an elevator down to the lobby and fled the building heading east towards Brooklyn Ave., cops said.

Investigators recovered nine .45-caliber shell casings and five bullet fragments from the scene.

Police described the shooter as a dark-skinned bald man wearing a blue jacket and tan boots.

Father, stepson shot dead by neighbour over noise in apartment building.

-New York Daily News/TNS