GUN CRIME SURGE

NYC Woman Killed at Vigil for Man Killed Hours Before

The woman’s cousin said her brother had been killed in a 2018 shooting. “You can imagine how devastating this is for her mother to lose two children to gun violence.”

A Brooklyn woman attending a Monday night vigil for Miles Bobbsemple, 31, a local man fatally shot that morning, was killed when an unidentified gunman began firing on the crowd. Shalimar Birkett, a 32-year-old mom of two who worked at a local retail store, was found lying on the sidewalk with a gunshot wound to her head. Birkett’s cousin, who asked not to be named, told Gothamist that Birkett’s brother, then-25-year-old Neyon Hamilton, had been killed in a 2018 shooting. “You can imagine how devastating this is for her mother to lose two children to gun violence,” the relative said. While authorities are not yet sure if the shootings are connected, New York City has had a massive surge in gun violence in the past year. The NYPD’s latest CompStat report shows an 83.6 percent increase in the number of people shot in 2021 compared to 2020.