Delia Johnson Prospect Heights woman executed along Brooklyn street by woman who remains at large. Killer described as family friend.
Video has captured a NYC woman being executed by another woman who calmly walked up to her and shot her in the back of the head along a Brooklyn street.
Delia Johnson, 42, was chatting with a group of people by a stoop on Franklin Ave. at Prospect Place in Prospect Heights at about 9:40 p.m. Wednesday, a few blocks from her home, when her attacker ambushed her.
Family members told the nydailynews they believe the shooter followed Johnson from a funeral in the neighborhood earlier in the day.
‘She was at a funeral earlier in the evening for an old neighborhood friend to pay her respects, and then this happened,’ her brother, Mathis Johnson, 47 told tabloid. ‘It was horrible. That lady executed my sister.’
The killer, a black woman with blond hair wearing a black top and black leggings, lifted her gun and shot Johnson in the head, then fired at her again as she hit the ground.
this why you don’t play with people. bitches really be dangerous. peep how calm this bitch was. pic.twitter.com/wgnnbHkGuI
— SOPHIABOSS (@sophiaabosss) August 6, 2021
Unknown motive
The gun violence sent bystanders fleeing for their lives. One man recoiled in horror near a parked car, while the people Johnson were speaking to toppled backward on the stoop in front of her, video shows.
Video shows the shooter walking to a white, double-parked sedan, getting in the driver’s seat and driving off.
It remained unclear what sparked the shooting and whether the victim knew her attacker or whether the shooting was a kind of retribution for something that may have taken place while the two women having earlier attended the funeral.
A report via the nypost told of the victim’s mother saying the shooter was a family friend who had stayed at their house.
‘I know her!’ Delia’s mother, Delia Barry told the nypost. ‘Oh my God, oh my God, she used to stay with us. She slept in my bed, ate my food.’
One of the victim’s younger sisters, Hadijah Pendley, called the suspect ‘a family friend who came to our family events, celebrations, holidays — whatever you want to call it, she came.’
Johnson’s siblings described her as ebullient and generous, an entrepreneur who had become successful enough to buy a car for her 17-year-old daughter.
‘She was a beautiful woman’
The funeral Johnson attended before the shooting took place at the Sealy Culyer Funeral Home on Pacific St., just four blocks away. It drew hundreds of mourners from the neighborhood, Mathis Johnson said.
The victim’s brother said didn’t know the woman in the video, but said she had attended the funeral as well.
‘She was a beautiful person,’ Mathis Johnson said of his sister. ‘She didn’t necessarily have the world to give, but she would give it. She was an amazing woman. Everybody says positive things when people pass, but everything I said about her was 100 percent true.’
The victim’s sister, Cordelia Berry, was also reeling from the murder Thursday night, and vowed to take care of her sister’s daughter.
‘She always said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, take care of my baby,’’ Berry told the nydailynews.
Berry said she suspected the killer was envious of her sister’s success.
Surge of gun violence in NYC post pandemic
‘She was Miss Electric. She was the life of the party. She was a rainbow,’ Berry told the nydailynews. ‘She had her own business. She was an entrepreneur – fashion was her passion. When you succeed in life that way, people are jealous.’
As of Friday night, police have made no arrests. The identity of the shooter has yet to be revealed.
The episode comes amid an expansive rise in violent crime in NYC post pandemic.
For the month of July, the NYPD made 383 gun arrests, up 133.5 percent compared to last July, the mayor said, while gun arrests in general have gone up 44.5 percent in 2021.
Shootings have spiked 15.8 per cent in 2021 compared to last year, with 900 shooting incidents in 2021 compared to 777 in 2020.
There are also 12 per cent more shooting victims this year, the data shows, with 1,057 people falling prey to gun violence compared to 944 last year.
The biggest leap in crime rates is for hate crimes, which have surged by 103 per cent in the last year. The data come amid numerous random attacks on Asian Americans in the city in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
