Prosecutors in Brooklyn on Tuesday charged 32 people who they said were associated with two rival gangs in the borough’s Brownsville neighborhood. The two groups had been locked in a cycle of retaliatory shootings over several years that had left two gang members dead and 14 people injured.
The indictments were announced during a briefing at the office of the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, who appeared alongside Keechant L. Sewell, the commissioner of the New York Police Department; James Essig, the department’s chief of detectives; and Jason Savino, the head of the department’s Gun Violence Suppression Division.
The investigation, called Operation Close Quarters, took over two-and-a-half years and covered a total of 27 incidents, Mr. Gonzalez said. In total, the prosecutor’s office unsealed four indictments, with 106 total charges, including conspiracy to commit murder, homicide, weapons possession and reckless endangerment.
The violence between the two gangs — the WOOO and the CHOO — which operated in neighboring public housing developments, began in the summer of 2020 with the killing of a WOOO member, Jahrell Gause, prosecutors said. But the retaliatory violence between the two gangs was fully unleashed five days later after Shamel Boomer, a man associated with the WOOO, was killed and the CHOO celebrated his death on social media, according to prosecutors.
The CHOO’s posts about Mr. Boomer, which were interpreted as insults, led to an exchange of threats between the rival gangs on social media that eventually erupted onto the streets of Brownsville, Mr. Gonzalez said. Shootings occurred as children were walking with their parents nearby. A 3-year-old girl was shot in the shoulder while leaving a day care center with her father. And one shooting between rival members took place outside of a medical office. Another WOOO member, Tyrie McLaughlin, was killed in 2022. “There’s no thinking about the terrible consequences that this behavior is causing in their community,” Mr. Gonzalez said, referring to the groups. “They’re simply going to shoot on sight at rival gang members.”
Several of those charged had a history of violence and had been arrested in connection to past shootings, Mr. Savino said. “These are that small group of individuals that make it downright dangerous for all the great people in our communities,” he said.
The announcement on Tuesday follows the indictments of several sprawling criminal gang organizations in the city over the past year. In each case, prosecutors said that the dozens of people charged had terrorized their neighborhoods with violence.
Over the summer, Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, announced state and federal indictments against 24 people connected to a subgroup of a criminal gang known as the Trinitarios. The subgroup, known as Own Every Dollar, was accused of committing murders, shootings, robberies and other crimes mainly around their Washington Heights neighborhood in Manhattan.
And in January, the Brooklyn prosecutor’s office charged 17 members of three street gangs in the borough that had formed an alliance and that had unleashed a wave of violence, leaving four people dead and 10 others wounded, according to prosecutors. The men and women indicted ranged in age from 17 to 23 and faced charges of second-degree murder, assault and criminal possession.
At a news conference at the time announcing the indictments, Mayor Eric Adams said that takedowns of large criminal gang networks should be duplicated across the city.
“We’re not going to live in a culture of violence and we won’t be defined by the crisis of violence,” he said.
If convicted, some of those charged on Tuesday face life sentences, while many face a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison, Mr. Gonzalez said.
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