Years ago retailers used a “calling tree.” If a suspicious person came into a store, an employee would call to alert other stores in the neighborhood.

Today, the Internet is taking this idea to another level, says Professor Robert McCrie from John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Department of Security, Fire and Emergency Management.

Through blogs, crime mapping sites and other digital tools, residents are communicating and learning about crime in their own neighborhoods. Online they can often find more on local crime than they can from traditional sources, such as news outlets or neighborhood association meetings. And websites and other digital tools are an efficient way to identify and monitor crime patterns—and bring attention to the authorities.

Electronic crime watching, or “e-watch,” as McCrie refers to it, has changed how both community members and law enforcement learn about crime. With watch patrols under scrutiny after the killing of 14-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida, these kinds of efforts may gain momentum.

“We are already quite connected now and this connectedness has helped reduce crime,” he says.

For example, says McCrie, he recently heard about a woman who interviewed over the phone for a babysitting job. Afterwards, she received several messages from the person, saying that she was hired, and she would be sent a check in advance. But after the last message, she figured out it was an advanced fee fraud. She then went on her blog and warned people about this scam.

McCrie also says that smartphones have become a great crime-watching tool. “The amount of video information that members of the public can collect with their smartphones now is having a real impact on crime mitigation. Just anyone with a smartphone can be a crime fighter,” he says. And this information can be given to the police.

The New York City Police Deparment has a unit that can take images that are not so good, like ones taken on a smartphone, and make them better, he adds.

The NYPD declined to comment on the value of these digital tools when called, but requested that The Brooklyn Ink send an email. We are waiting for a reply.

Though, like most information online, there’s a possibility that misinformation could occur, says McCrie. “Somebody who has a gripe against another individual could use this means to anonymously get the individual in trouble.”

But law enforcement knows that they can’t take every bit of information they receive on face value, he says. And they know to treat crime reports with both interest and skepticism.

Here are five different digital tools that are used locally and nationally to communicate about crime, and how they are bringing the concept of neighborhood watch online.

Save Brooklyn Now! 

Errol Louis, a Crown Heights resident and political anchor at NY1, started Save Brooklyn Now!, a blog, as a way to keep track of emails that DCPI, the Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, sent him.

Around 2006, when he was a crime columnist at the Daily News, he started posting those emails, which give information about crimes, the missing or the wanted, on a blog.

But other people found his blog useful. Today, Save Brooklyn Now! is still mainly DCPI reports, but also has other crime related information, such as an event for a local community group that stands up against violence, Save Our Streets Crown Heights. His posts concentrate in the precincts around where he lives—the 71st and 77th (Crown Heights), 79th and 81st (Bedford-Stuyvesant), 73rd (Brownsville) and 88th (Fort Greene/Clinton Hill).

By putting accurate information online, Louis’ blog is a reliable, convenient place to read about local crime.

The problem with relying on news reports to learn about crime, is that what’s reported isn’t consistent he says. And often there isn’t enough, data, such as specific addresses.

People who may miss neighborhood association or precinct meetings, where more local information about crime is often communicated, can go to his blog for updates.

But online crime reporting can lead to misreported information, and since the information on his blog comes from the DCPI reports, it’s a “form of rumor control,” Louis says.

Brooklynian 

This local blog and forum is a place where Brooklynites can go to post messages about almost any subject. Posts are divided by neighborhood and topic—and often discuss something crime-related.

For example, a poster in the Prospect Heights section of the Brooklynian forum started a new thread in October: “I’ve been living at Washington Ave & St. Marks since June, and last night this together-looking guy with glasses stopped me between Vanderbilt and Underhill on Prospect Place, and told me his mother had a stroke and crashed her car, and he needed a few bucks. All I had was a 20 and hearing the words ‘mother’ and ‘stroke’ put me in some kind of sympathy trance and I gave it to him!”

The writer then added a link to a video showing this same man being caught on film six years ago, making a similar plea. She added this title to her blog post: “The Prospect Heights con artist is back.”

More recently a person last month posted about a thief who stole their iPhone on Fourth Avenue and 5th Street in Park Slope, warning people to be careful about walking around with their smartphones on the street.

Lawrence Quigley, a Prospect Heights resident, uses Brooklynian and believes it helps people become more aware of what’s going on in the neighborhood. But he admits that it isn’t perfect, and residents need to use it cautiously.

Brooklynian is anecdotal, “It’s a double edged sword, ” says Quigley. Although before sites like Brooklynian, residents would know about things just sporadically, people can get too caught up and develop a sense of fear, he says.

Things can get distorted. Once a cop told me that ‘It’s like two old ladies talking over the fence,’” he adds.

Nation of Neighbors 

Nation of Neighbors is an online community network that allows neighbors to share crime and other community concerns.

Founder Art Hanson first started with the site Watch Jefferson County. A resident of the West Virginia county, he created it around early 2005 with just 30 people as a crime mapping site. Around the end of 2009, he launched Nation of Neighbors.

Today it has 500 neighborhood groups, about 50,000 users, and about 12 counties that have an involved police presence with the site, and a mobile app is in the works.

“There had been a number of burglaries in my neighborhood and I had talked to the local sheriff about trying to set up a neighborhood watch, and I found out that my community already had a neighborhood watch, officially, but nobody went to meetings, nobody knew who was in charge,” says Hanson.

“The benefit of doing it online is that you don’t necessarily have to have those monthly meetings. You don’t have to work as hard to maintain the personal connections because should something come up you still have your network in place electronically,” he continues.

Once signed up on the site, you can search for an existing group in your neighborhood, or and can create your own. You select on a map where you want the boundary of your group to be, and whether it’s public, open to anyone who lives in the selected area with approval or no approval, or private, where you can only join by invitation.

Individuals, community groups and law enforcements use Nation of Neighbors, and can receive email or text message alerts about crime reported through the site, or from participating law enforcement.

Some communities also use it as news sharing source in place of a neighborhood website. They post things such as local events and minutes from community meetings.

Most of Nation of Neighbors’ users live in rural or suburban areas, says Hanson. The site lists only two public groups in New York City—in the Bronx and Inwood.

SpotCrime 

This crime mapping site started in Baltimore in 2007, and now is in most major cities, as well as the United Kingdom and Canada. Today, it’s the most visited crime-mapping site in the United States, says founder Colin Drane.

Drane created the site because he wanted to know where crime was occurring in Baltimore, where he lives, a place that historically has been a high crime city, he says.

There’s a “significant appetite from the public to know what’s going on around them,” he says. And maps can be a more informative way of looking at crime, rather than just reading or hearing about it.

On the site, you enter your address and a Google map of your neighborhood comes up with the pinpointed location of the crimes. Each offense has a different graphic to symbolize it—such as a burglar dressed in black for a robbery, and a closed fist for an assault.

People can also sign up for email alerts. Block captain and neighborhood watch people often sign up for these alerts.

The site gathers the crime data from a number of sources—information released from the police, news media and reports sent in directly to the site from individuals.

Though, Drane points out, the site only receives a small number of reports straight from users. For cities where police regularly release data on specific crimes and location, this is mainly where the information comes from. For example, in Chicago, anyone can go online and look up crimes by location.

New York City, says Drane, is one of the most closed cities when it comes to releasing data on specific crimes. The NYPD releases statistics on types of crimes in each precinct, but not individual reports. SpotCrime often uses local news sources to map crimes in the city.

Still, Brooklyn is one of the top 10 places visitors to the site come from, says Drane, both because of its size and its interest in looking up local crime.

Neighborhood Watch App 

This app, available for iPhone, Blackberry and Android platforms, was developed by the Community Safety Institute, which oversaw the White House-mandated redevelopment of the national Neighborhood Watch program.

Costing $1.99, it allows users to report any non-emergency crime from their smartphone, with or without photos. These reports are linked to a local police department.

It also has neighborhood watch tips and training videos.

“We believe strongly in providing our volunteers with robust, easy-to-use tools to help them report and stay informed. The NW App is our latest tool and is designed for those volunteers who are on-the-go in their communities,” it says on the app’s website.

A shooting that left three children and a rabbi dead outside of a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, has put Jewish institutions in Brooklyn on high alert. (Photo: AP)

On March 19, a lone gunman in southern France murdered three Jewish schoolchildren and a rabbi outside of the Ozar Hatorah secondary school in Toulouse. On Thursday morning, just three days after the shootings, French police killed Mohammed Merah after they stormed the gun-wielding suspect’s home.

The incident has sent ripples across the world, and put New York police—and Brooklyn synagogues— on alert. The NYPD responded this week by stepping up security at Jewish institutions throughout the city, including Yeshiva University in Washington Heights and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan.

The city “remains the most likely venue for global tensions with Iran to spill over onto American soil,” said Mitchell Silber, director of intelligence analysis for the NYPD, in his testimony before Congress Wednesday.

New York City boasts one of the largest Jewish populations outside of Israel, and local residents have been stirred by the Toulouse killings. Abe Rosen, a retired Williamsburg schoolteacher, said while the NYPD generally has a strong presence around Jewish institutions in Brooklyn, it’s great to have more security in the wake of such an episode.

“We see them standing by the synagogues on Saturdays, and during the week by the schools,” Rosen said. What he doesn’t understand, however, is the motive of people like Merah. “Those people, they don’t care for their own lives.”

Yoel Braver, a 33-year-old Williamsburg salesman, said that although he’s happy with the increase in the city’s police presence following the killings, he thinks more could be done to ensure security in the area. “We appreciate it,” he said, “but it would be helpful if they put in more cameras.” Braver believes that more surveillance around schools would help prevent such incidents.

But not everybody is sold on the surge in protection. Rabbi Zalman Liberow of Flatbush appreciates the NYPD’s efforts, but says he doesn’t understand what immediate protection from the police department will ensure.

“It’s hard to pinpoint when the next terrorists will decide to strike” Liberow said via telephone.

Though the Toulouse gunman’s actions have been called an isolated hate crime, Brooklyn’s leaders have been mindful of hate crimes here at home – not only against the Jewish community, but also to other groups in the community.

According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, hate groups – particularly ones targeting people based on race, religious affiliation and sexual orientation – are on the rise in America.
A spokesman for Councilmember Stephen Levin, who didn’t wish to be named, says the Jewish community is only one of many minority groups in the area that are targeted for hate crimes, and that citizens should be mindful of that.

“The very best we can do to make sure that the community is safe is to encourage them to be aware,” Levin’s spokesman said in a telephone interview. Drawing attention to such crimes, he says, is one of the best ways to ward off threats.

Rabbi Liberow, meanwhile, is confounded by such tragedies. “We’re living in a crazy world now. I don’t know what really should be done,” he said. “Honestly speaking, it really lays in the hands of God.”

The Brooklyn Lens tackles the video about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and how it went viral in this week’s webcast for March 9, 2012.

Will Crandall is an ex-convict who runs a fitness program for young men and women in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Through his rigorous training, he hopes to reform teenagers and keep them from making the same mistakes he did.

Produced by Jessica Hartogs and Sarah Munir.

Read more at ny1

Inside Brooklyn Supreme Court House. Nicole Anderson/ The Brooklyn Ink

An eyewitness in a double murder trial testified in Kings County Criminal Court Thursday that he saw the defendant, Sean Steer, shoot three times at one of the victims.

The eyewitness, Mr. Hunt, said he fled, only to discover later that the second victim at the shooting scene in Prospect Heights was his brother, Vance Rock.

“I looked in the ambulance and my brother wasn’t moving,” Hunt said. “His chest wasn’t moving up and down at all.  He was lifeless.”

On July 18^th, Steer was arrested for allegedly shooting Vance Rock and Darrian Delk after a heated verbal exchange at a block party Delk and Rock were sitting in their car at Washington Avenue and St. John’s Place when the defendant walked up and started firing bullets at them said Police.

Responding to questions from Assistant District Attorney Robert Walsh, Hunt said that moments earlier he had pulled up on his motorcycle next to his brother’s Chevy Caprice.  His brother told him that he was “having trouble with some guys” who were standing nearby, Hunt testified, and that his brother said, “looks like these guys are hating on me.”

Hunt learned that his brother had hit a guy he described as the “little guy with glasses” before he had arrived.

As the Hunt stood resting on his bike, he claimed that a guy he hadn’t noticed before came up and shot three bullets at Delk. The witness then took off on his bike.  It was after he returned a short while later that he discovered that his brother had been shot in the head and killed.

Hunts’ two brothers were speaking to police at the scene. Hunt told his brothers, “not to mention the fight to the officers. I wanted to see how I would go about handling things myself—thinking about taking things into my own hands and find out who killed my brother.”

Walsh asked, “Were you thinking of revenge?”

“Yes,” replied Hunt.

Walsh continued to question Hunt about his conversation with the detectives at the hospital.

“I didn’t tell Detective Perez that my brother knocked out the guy with glasses.”

However, a few weeks later, Hunt decided to come clean and tell the detectives everything.

Just as Walsh was asking why, Judge Joel M. Goldberg interjected and warned Walsh not to lead the witness.

“What changed your mind?” asked Judge Goldberg.

“A lot happened at home. Worse to lose another one [another son] and doing something stupid and going away for the rest of my life,” said Hunt.

A few weeks after that conversation, Hunt came to the precinct and identified the defendant in a police line-up.

The prosecution put a photograph of the car up on the screen and asked Hunt to show where he was parked on his motorcycle in relation to the car. Hunt pointed and said his wheel was only a few feet away from the wheel of his brother’s car.

“I had no difficulty seeing the guy with glasses or the defendant,” said Hunt.

Hunt told the court that he was still standing in the very same place when the three bullets were shot.

After the prosecution finished their line of questioning, defense attorney, Mr. Rodriguez, stood up and addressed the witness, “You have two violent felony convictions, correct?”

“Yes,” Hunt replied.

Hunt revealed under further questioning that he had served prison terms for shooting an off duty police officer in the leg and for robbery.

Judge Goldberg cut in to the testimony to explain to the jury that Hunt was not on trial, but that this information is relevant because it speaks to a witness’ credibility.

Rodriquez reminded Hunt that he initially told the detectives that he had left before the shots were fired, and had failed to mention the fight between Rock and the “little guy with glasses.”

As the cross-examination continued, Rodriguez attempted to show the inconsistencies and holes in Hunt’s testimony.  Hunt responded gruffly at times.

It is the second time he has testified. The trial continues.

22-year-old Kyle Decoteau was shot and killed in Bed-Stuy in July. (Picture courtesy of the Kyle Decoteau Foundation)

Kyle Decoteau, 22, was shot and killed in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the early hours of July 20, 2011.

His death and its aftermath, which saw a wave of anti-crime sentiment ripple through the neighborhood, highlighted two facts about Bed-Stuy: though safer than in the past, it’s still plagued by crime; and its residents are fed up with the plague.

“It is time for community members to speak out,” said Kurtis Miller, who tutored Decoteau in math, reading, and writing for six years. “Criminals need to be made to understand that their actions have an effect on people, and themselves as well, in time.”

Bed-Stuy’s reputation as a dangerous neighborhood had even seeped into pop culture. Billy Joel’s 1980 single “You May Be Right” used the phrase “I walked through Bedford-Stuy alone” as evidence against the singer’s own sanity. Jay-Z, who grew up in Bed-Stuy’s famous Marcy Houses, raps about rising from the mean streets of Brooklyn to superstardom, “from Marcy to Madison Square.”

NYPD crime statistics corroborated the gist of the performers’ words and the reality of Bed Stuy’s violent past. There were 120 murders in 1990 in the neighborhood, which is comprised of the 79^th and 81^st precincts. There were also 3,886 robberies—more than ten per day.

But over the course of the next decade, crime rates fell dramatically. In 2001, Bed-Stuy’s precincts reported 43 murders and 1,046 robberies. Between 1990 and 2001, total instances of the “seven major felonies”—murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and grand larceny auto—fell by 66 percent.

Ten years later, crime rates are hovering in an uneasy spot: much lower than in the 90’s and still declining, but still too high. Last year, there were 29 murders in the neighborhood. That was enough to give Bed-Stuy, with a population of 161,290, an intentional homicide rate of nearly 18 per 100,000 residents, almost four times the national rate of 4.8 per 100,000, according to FBI statistics.

The rate is more or less on track to remain the same in 2011.

According to Kim Best, president of the 79^th Precinct Community Council and chairperson of Bed-Stuy’s Civic Safety Committee, community concern has been a key factor in the fight against crime.

“It’s very important that the community has taken safety into their own hands,” she said.“The NYPD can’t be everywhere: they can’t put a police officer on every block.”

One way that has been effective has been the establishment of action groups and block associations.

“I oversee more than 200 block associations,” she said. “At night on streets where a lot of crime happens, we have block watches. Certain people will be assigned to monitor the block at night, usually from inside their home. And if anything happens, they have the police on the phone right away.”

According to Best, the number of block associations in the area has grown dramatically since she first became involved with the Civic Safety Committee a decade ago.

Still, 23 people have been killed in Bed-Stuy this year.

One of them was Kyle Decoteau, shot twice on a stoop while trying to cool off on a hot summer night.In the wake of his death, his friends and family set out to galvanize the people of Bed-Stuy.

Ann Decoteau, Kyle’s mother, founded a nonprofit public charity, the Kyle Decoteau Foundation, in the aftermath of her son’s death. It represents just the sort of community-born resistance to crime that Best described as crucial.

The group organizes rallies and is raising money to provide counseling for kids and young men that have participated in or fallen victim to gang-related crime. At a march against violence organized by the foundation and held on Nov. 25, members of Kyle’s family, his friends, and people who had never met him walked through Bed-Stuy, shouting and chanting, their intolerance for crime on full and powerful display.

Decoteau’s tutor, Kurtis Miller, was also moved by his former pupil’s death. He wrote an open letter to the community, published in late August by local media outlets, pleading for peace and sensibility.

“Peace,” he wrote, “is a spiritual rest from within us, an unexplainable feeling far from our own conscious understanding that conquers the very circumstances which cause us to treat one another unkindly.”

Miller is no stranger to people treating each other unkindly. His brother was murdered in Harlem in 1996. He now considers it his duty to use his intimate knowledge of loss and tragedy as a weapon against crime.

“It’s too late for Kyle,” he says. “But there will be so many more like him if we [community members] don’t speak up.”

More Stories on The Brooklyn Ink:

Soccer Inspires Kids in Crown Heights

Brooklynites Cautious as Subway Theft Rises

Brownsville Street Gangs to Attempt Peace Talk

At the site of Alla Kamenev's murder, neighbors left a card of remembrance. Anna Hiatt/ The Brooklyn Ink

Ten seconds after he enters the frame of the surveillance video, he’s gone.

The man on the bicycle pulls himself over the curb and begins to pedal down the sidewalk of West Brighton Avenue, headed toward West First Street. The timestamp reads 11:44:49. He moves past cars waiting for the traffic light at Ocean Parkway, past a restaurant, a pharmacy and a supermarket, their signs all in Russian. The day is October 20, just before noon, in Brighton Beach.

Five minutes later and two blocks away, Alla Kamenev lies dying on the sidewalk. She is bleeding onto the pavement in broad daylight next to the black wrought-iron fence separating Asser Levy Park from Sea Breeze Avenue. She is 65 years old and will be pronounced dead at Coney Island Hospital that afternoon.

Later that day, police learned from witnesses that the person who had shot her was a man on a bicycle wearing a white baseball cap, two-toned jacket, blue pants and white sneakers. After shooting Alla three times in the torso, he pedaled away.

Police talked with an employee at the medical supply store who had seen the shooting happen. They talked with Vlad Godin, reportedly her lover—it is unclear whether they are married—who shared an apartment with her at Brightwater Towers at 601 B Surf Ave., just three blocks away. They talked with her son, Vsevolod Kamenev, who lives with his father, Dimitry—Alla’s estranged husband—in what was once her home on Brighton 7th Street. They canvassed the neighborhood looking to talk with anyone who might know something about why a 65-year-old woman had been killed in a safe neighborhood in the middle of the day.

This is a story filled with mysteries set in a corner of Brooklyn where people refer to the Atlantic Ocean as the Black Sea. It is Little Odessa. Whatever neighbors may know about the relationship between Alla and Dimitry Kamenev, they keep to themselves. She was, in fact, so little known that in the makeshift memorial set up at the site of her murder, a card reads: “We never knew you in life but we mourn your passing as neighbors.”

This is what is known. On October 25, police arrested and charged Dimitry Kamenev with criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree and murder in the second degree. Police allege that Dimitry was the man who approached Alla on a bicycle and shot her three times before riding away.

Bernard Udell, Dimitry’s defense attorney, met his client for the first time last week. Dimitry, he said, was walking with “a couple of canes,” but appeared to be in good health “for a man his age.” They spoke to each other through a translator—Dimitry speaks limited English, Udell doesn’t speak Russian. One thing Udell does know is that Dimitry denies the charges against him.

This is not Dimitry’s first run-in with the law. In 1988 and again in 1991, he was arrested for allegedly committing assault, according to the New York Police Department. The charges were dropped in 1988; the record doesn’t show why. In 1991, Dimitry was indicted on charges of reckless endangerment in the first degree and two charges of criminal possession of a weapon. He pled guilty to the charge of third-degree criminal possession on Nov. 15 and was sentenced on Dec. 6. He spent the next two months at the Eric M. Taylor Center on Rikers Island and was discharged on Feb. 14, 1992. That’s where his criminal record ended.

Dimitry lives in the house on Brighton 7th Street at the intersection of Neptune Avenue that Alla purchased in 1994. In 2007, Alla signed the deed for 2851 Brighton 7th St. over to her son Vsevolod Kamenev, and a year later, she bought an apartment on Surf Avenue. The Kamenev house sits on a residential block adjacent to a Pakistani fabric shop and across the street from a laundromat and a day care center.

The immediate Kamenev family consisted of Alla, Dimitry and their two sons, Vsevolod and Alexey. The former lives in the house on Brighton 7th Street. The latter lived in New York and currently resides in Illinois.

The rest of the story remains a mystery.

Since the day she died, police and reporters have descended on the block asking the Kamenevs and their neighbors about Alla’s family and her life. Eleven days after she died, they couldn’t or wouldn’t talk. Detectives told Kamenev’s next door neighbor he couldn’t speak about Dimitry to the press. Those inside the Kamenev house wouldn’t. A blonde-haired woman refused to open the front door for reporters and shooed them away as she peered through the white slatted blinds covering the front window.

Later that day, a man who refused to identify himself but who matched the description of Vsevolod and who was wearing a blue auto mechanic jumpsuit with a patch reading “KAMENEV” on the left breast, spoke long enough to say, “I don’t talk to reporter. This is a private matter.” He turned and walked back toward the house.

Alla had owned a fifth-floor apartment at Brightwater Towers since 2008. She was living there with Vlad Godin at the time of her murder. She had recently retired, and Godin said in a TV interview that they were looking forward to spending more time together. The fluorescent lighting makes the lobby of their building feel like a hospital. A security guard at the front desk monitors security cameras and checks in guests. Down the hall, past the laundry room, sit the elevators.

Vlad Godin had seen his fair share of reporters over the last eleven days. On Halloween, he answered yet another knock on his door to find yet another reporter waiting outside. “You’re the third one today,” Godin said, leaning his head against the door and blocking the view of his apartment.

He was quiet, and his eyes were red. The TV blared in the background and the shades of his apartment were drawn. He sounded tired when he said he didn’t want to talk. He didn’t close the door, but he didn’t volunteer more words.

On the streets of Brighton Beach, even those far removed from the Kamenev family had no answers to questions about Alla, Dimitry, or the day that he allegedly killed her. Stan, the owner of the Pharmacy Anteka on Brighton Beach Avenue, had a little to contribute: Alla had purchased medication once at the store one year ago. None of the staff at Anteka remembered her, though; they found her name when going through their customer database after hearing about the murder. Stan had also seen Dimitry walking in the neighborhood, though they had never interacted. That was the extent of what he knew about the Kamenevs.

“I’m not surprised it could be an ex-husband who did it,” he said, pausing to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. “But I’m surprised someone that age could have a gun or do that.”

At the site of her murder, the makeshift memorial for Alla Kamenev consisted of two wilted bouquets of roses, a candle burnt down to its wick and a Ziploc bag containing the card from neighbors who barely knew her. The factory-printed message read, “In this time of sorrow, please know that you are not alone.” Inside the card for Alla, they bid her farewell and wrote, invoking God’s name in Hebrew, “May Hashem keep you.”

Courtesy DCPI

**

More coverage of Alla Kamenev’s murder by The Brooklyn Ink:

76-Year-Old Coney Island Man Indicted for Ex-Wife’s Murder | Mon., Oct. 31, 2011
Suspect Arrested in Brighton Beach Shooting | Tues., Oct. 25, 2011

Kamenev was arrested Tuesday, Oct. 25 and charged with the murder of Alla Kamenev. Bernard Udell, Kamenev’s defense attorney, said his client denies the charges.

Alla Kamenev was shot dead by a man riding a child’s bicycle at 11:50 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 20 at the corner of West Second Street and Seabreeze Avenue in Coney Island. She died on route to Coney Island Hospital.

The window of the Peanut Supermarket has now become a memorial for Zurana Horton. (Cristabelle Tumola / Brooklyn Ink)

Just days before a mother of 13 was killed in front of the Peanut supermarket in Brownsville, a bullet went through the window of the same store, nearly missing a worker inside, according to an employee at the store, who declined to give his name.

Four or five days before the mother’s murder, between the hours of 10 and 11 p.m. a stray bullet that came from outside the store pierced through the supermarket’s side window, the employee said. According to him, another employee was working behind the counter, just in front of the window, but walked away from the counter just before the bullet hit.

A bullet hole is still visible from inside the supermarket, located at 112 Watkins St. on the corner of Pitkin Avenue. No evidence exists to suggest that incident is connected to the murder that occurred later that week.

The outside of that same window is now a memorial to the mother, 34-year-old Zurana Horton of Brownsville, who was murdered Friday afternoon.

Three suspects were arraigned on Wednesday at Brooklyn’s Kings County Criminal Court in connection with the shooting. The violence also left a 31-year-old woman seriously wounded with gunshots to her arm and chest and an 11-year-old girl with a graze wound to her check.

Andrew Lopez, 18, and Jonathan Carrasquillo, 22, were arrested Tuesday and charged with 2nd degree murder, two counts of felony assault and criminal possession of a weapon. A third suspect, 17-year-old Kristian Lopez, was charged with criminal possession of a weapon in connection with the same incident, police said.

The Daily News reported that, according to its sources, Andrew Lopez confessed to the shootings after his arrest, telling police that the killings were not intentional. According to police, Lopez was a former drug dealer and a gang member who was shooting at rival gang members from his apartment building roof at 1800 Pitkin Ave., the report said.

All three suspects have addresses for that same Pitkin Avenue building, said police.

During the day Wednesday people continued to stop and look at the memorial to Horton just off of one of Brownsville’s main commercial streets.

As some of these people quietly read the words praising Horton, they declined to comment on the shooting.

These words, left on the outside of the Peanut supermarket’s bullet-damaged window, are a mix of calls to end the violence, such as “Stop: put the guns down,” and words of praise for the murdered mother who many are calling a hero.

According to police, Horton and the 31-year-old victim were picking up their children from PS 298, at 85 Watkins Street, just diagonally across the street from Peanut supermarket.

Moments before Horton was killed, she was seen shielding several children to protect them from the gunshots.

Although others didn’t want to discuss their reaction to the arrests, the Peanut employee, who was working at the market on the day of the murder, said that people in the neighborhood seem more relaxed now that the suspects have been charged.