NYC's West Indian Day parade shooting victim dies; police still looking for gunman

NEW YORK — A 25-year-old man shot with four others while attending the West Indian Day parade has died of his wounds in what is believed to be a gang-related shooting, police said Tuesday.

Denzel Chan died at Kings County Hospital after being fatally shot in the stomach by a man who fired into a crowd of onlookers Monday afternoon. The suspect remains at large, police said.

“I hope they catch him. We’re looking for justice!” Chan’s aunt Carol Dover told the Daily News. “Denzel was a good person. He would speak quietly, no disrespect to no one.”

Four men and one woman ranging in age from 69 to 16 were wounded when the gunman opened fire at about 2:30 p.m. near the corner of Eastern Parkway and Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights, NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said.

“This was one person intentionally going after a group of people who tried to ruin the day for everybody,” Chell said.

It was not immediately clear who the gunman was targeting when the fatal shots were fired.

The four surviving victims — which included 64-year-old Marius Sirju, his 69-year-old sister-in-law Gertrude Lake, a 36-year-old man and a 16-year-old boy — are all expected to recover, NYPD officials said Tuesday.

Chan had an address in Texas but was born and raised in East Flatbush, family members said. The former Amazon employee lived with his 60-year-old father Collin Dover, who didn’t know he had gone to the parade.

“He lived with me right up to now, since he was a baby,” the heartbroken dad said. “Now he’s 25 and I had no problems with him.”

To his relatives, Chan was considered a sensitive homebody who “liked to laugh,” his aunt said.

“Denzel is a person if you talk to him, you got to talk to him quietly,” she said.

Chan didn’t have a criminal record in New York City, police said.

The five victims were standing on the sidewalk when the gunman started shooting from the concrete divider between the Eastern Parkway service road and the parade route, where “thousands of people were watching the parade,” Chell said at a press conference at the scene Monday.

“I heard the shots,” said Tito Guillette, 63, who traveled to Brooklyn from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to see the parade. “We just saw people running. I didn’t think it was shots. It’s carnival time, it’s party time. I thought it was firecrackers or something.”

Two bullets hit Sirju. One grazed his arm and the other punched through his shoulder.

The 64-year-old Brooklyn resident swore off going to the West Indian Day parade more than two decades ago after witnessing a shooting there. But, this year, he had relatives from Trinidad visiting and wanted to show them all the brilliantly colored floats and dancers along the parade route.

“I’m never going back there no more. No siree,” Sirju told The News. “I could have been a dead man. I could be in cold storage right now.”

He and his family were having dinner when they decided to walk over and watch the parade go by.

“I took a few videos and all of a sudden shots started ringing out,” he remembered. I did not know that I was the one who got hit and my sister-in-law.

“I only heard the shots, like ‘Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow!’ Five shots. I decided to duck and run, then I saw the blood. I was very scared, very scared. I thought I was going to hit the floor. I saw the blood and I clamped down on the jersey (barrier). It was pumping out.”

Sirju’s relatives scattered for cover as bullets whizzed by.

“I’m traumatized. I’m still trying to process what happened,” one of Sirju’s relatives said. “I was recording the parade and just heard gunshots. We all went down and that is it.”

A bullet hit Lake’s collarbone, relatives said. She was still recovering at Kings County Hospital on Tuesday.

“She’s much better than yesterday,” the relative said.

Sirju was released from the hospital late Monday and was greeted by worried neighbors Tuesday morning.

“He’s doing good. He’s healthy, he’s strong, he’s walking,” building superintendent Kimson Harper said. “He told me he got shot. I was shocked. He told me he was walking or something and that’s what happened.”

When asked, Sirju said that “young fellas” fired the shots, Harper said.

“Adults are not going there to shoot nobody, they’re going to enjoy themselves, see some beautiful ladies, drink, enjoy themselves,” Harper said. “Young people, they’re angry all the time. They see their enemy and attack them.”

Sirju lost his wife to cancer about three years ago and has a son with Down syndrome, neighbors said.

“He used to go (to the parade) every year, but then he stopped,” Harper, 43, said. “His family came this year. He wanted to show them around.”

No arrests have been made. The suspect is described as a Black man with a slim build. He was wearing a brown shirt with either paint or oil stains and was wearing a black bandanna, police said.

Chell asked anyone with video of the shooting to come forward.

“We need that video. We are going to solve this, but it’s going to take a lot of work,” he explained.

No other shootings or stabbings occurred during the parade, police said.

The bloodshed occurred just hours after Mayor Eric Adams boasted about parade safety, telling reporters, “We knew we could celebrate and be safe at the same time.”

On Tuesday Adams said that police were “proactive” by seizing 25 guns from people on area streets in the hours leading up to J’Ouvert and the West Indian Day Parade.

Police did everything possible to keep paradegoers safe, Adams said.

“Was there anything that we could do?” he asked. “How do you stop a nut from taking a gun (and) shooting into a crowd?”

The deadly shooting aside, Adams said the parade was safe overall.

“When you look at that one person, who we’re going to find, that shot five people, you remove him from the equation, you have hundreds of thousands of people that were out this weekend and really heard the call of a peaceful J’Ouvert and peaceful West Indian Day parade,” he said.

The NYPD had deployed a fleet of drones, carefully placed surveillance cameras, and sent a massive number of officers to cover the J’Ouvert celebration and West Indian Day Parade, which is historically plagued with shootings and violence.

Last year’s J’Ouvert celebration and West Indian Day parade were relatively safe, although there was a deadly shooting after the parade ended. There was also a fight that erupted in gunfire and an incident in which a man shot himself in the foot, police said.

Marie Dorseimvil, a longtime neighbor of Sirju, was stunned to hear he had been shot at the parade.

“I wasn’t expecting that but luckily he will survive,” Dorseimvil, 66, said. “There’s always shootings (at the parade). It’s random. That’s why I never go.”

Despite witnessing two shootings at the parade — and being wounded in one — Sirju doesn’t think the city should shut the parade down.

“It’s not that they should close it down, it’s that they have to get rid of the kind of people that spoil the show for us,” he said. “Why they have these young kids with guns in their waists and fighting against each other? They’re stupid. ”

Anyone with information regarding the parade shooting is asked to call NYPD Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS. All calls will be kept confidential.

________

(New York Daily News reporters Rocco Parascandola and Chris Sommerfeldt contributed to this story.)