There Was a Fatal Shooting On a Brooklyn Bus Last Night
In Bed-Stuy last night, a 14-year-old opened fire on a B15 bus full of passengers, fatally wounding 39-year-old Angel Rojas.
Via the New York Daily News, the alleged shooter (now in custody) was riding the B15 with his friends and opened fire “when an apparent rival boarded and started walking toward them.” A source told the News, “One kid pulls out a gun and he lets off a couple of rounds… He’s running out of the bus, still letting rounds go, and this poor guy gets shot in the back of the head. He wasn’t the intended victim.”
The shooting occurred at Marcus Garvey Boulevard and Lafayette Avenue, and Rojas was immediately rushed to Woodhull Hospital by the Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps, but was pronounced dead at 7:50pm. Rojas had come to New York about four years ago from the Dominican Republic and leaves behind a wife, Maria Lopez, and two children, Saury, 12, and April, 8.
The New York Times reports, “[Rojas] worked at two grocery stores and would take the B15 home in between shifts to hug his children and get something to eat, according to his family.” His son, Saury—just two years younger than his father’s alleged killer—told the Times about the accused young man, “That was very bad of him… He’s too small to be with a gun. If he didn’t have that gun, my dad would be alive now.”
The teenager in custody has yet to be charged, and the question of why and even how a 14-year-old would be in possession of a revolver of the magnitude used in the shooting remains unanswered. In the words of Rojas’s 26-year-old cousin, Josie Guerrero, “It was a 14-year-old. I feel like two lives have been taken.”
Follow Kristin Iversen on twitter @kmiversen
