PROSPECT LEFFERTS GARDENS — What started as a quiet Wednesday afternoon on Maple Street ended with a man shot in cold blood by a federal immigration agent, a block full of witnesses, and a neighborhood that for the first time in a long while remembered it was a neighborhood.
According to residents, ICE agents arrived on Maple Street in Prospect Lefferts Gardens sometime in the early afternoon, claiming they were looking for a man named Julio. No last name was given. No warrant was produced. Instead of conducting whatever lawful business they supposedly had, the agents began stopping folks walking down the public sidewalk and demanding to see their papers, as if this Nazi Germany.
The first man they laid hands on was Jack Weston. Now, anyone who knows ol' Jack knows he's been on that block longer than the trees have. Born and raised. The man fought with the MTA for thirty years and has a pension stub to prove his citizenship if that's what it came to, though it shouldn't have to come to that and everyone on Maple Street knows it. Jack's neighbor, Pete, whose last name this paper is withholding at the request of his family, given the circumstances, saw what was happening and did what any decent person would do. He went up the block and around the corner to warn the rest of the neighborhood that ICE was out shaking people down.
Meanwhile, young Tommy, the kid from down near the corner, started running around telling everyone there were "monsters outside." Now, Tommy's an odd duck, always has been, and nobody paid him much mind at first. But Claude Akins, God love him, is not the type of man to ignore a child who's upset, even a strange one, so he offered to see what was wrong.
Now, this writer would be lying if it said Maple Street had been getting along lately. It hasn't. The whole neighborhood has been on edge ever since word spread that ICE was operating in the outer boroughs. It had neighbor arguing with neighbor. Republican arguing with Democrat. People who'd borrowed each other's snow shovels for twenty years suddenly couldn't look each other in the eye over dinner-table politics. But something happened Wednesday afternoon that put all of that to bed, at least for one day.
Sally came out. Then Amzie. Then good old Les Goodman, who never could stay indoors when there was trouble. There was this one time in '86. Well that's a different article, but one by one, the people of Maple Street came out of their houses and off their stoops and they formed a crowd, and they started hollering at those ICE agents with the kind of full-throated Brooklyn indignation that used to echo off the walls of Ebbets Field. It was almost a beautiful thing, all these people who'd been at each other's throats for months, standing shoulder to shoulder, telling the federal government to go pound sand.
The agents, according to multiple witnesses, began to get physical. That's when Mrs. Farnsworth pulled out her phone. Les Goodman did the same. They started filming.
The ICE agents did not care for that one bit. They started yelling that residents were not permitted to film them. Which — and the Herald would like to be perfectly clear on this point — is a lie. You can film federal agents conducting operations in public spaces. That is your First Amendment right. It has been affirmed by courts across this country. You do not need their permission and they cannot lawfully stop you.
Sally, who has never in her life needed a lawyer to tell her what she already knew, informed the agents they could, and this is a direct quote, "get the hell out of here you fuck heads!" This paper would not normally print language of that nature, but frankly, Sally was being polite. Claude Akins, ever the peacemaker, attempted to de-escalate the situation. Young Tommy, however, was not helping matters — the boy was telling anyone who'd listen that he'd seen ICE agents kill people on Instagram and TikTok.
That's when the snowballs started. The Herald is not in the business of encouraging the throwing of snowballs at armed federal agents. We will note, however, that it was February in Brooklyn and there was snow on the ground and tempers were high and these agents had been manhandling people's neighbors for the better part of an hour.
What happened next will haunt Maple Street for years. One of the ICE agents — and we use the word "agent" loosely, because a man who pulls a firearm on a crowd of unarmed civilians over snowballs is not an agent of anything decent, drew his weapon on the crowd. Women. Children. Elderly folks. A gun. Pointed at Americans on an American street. And at that precise moment, Pete came back around the corner. He'd been one block over, warning the neighbors, doing the right thing.
The agent shot him.
Pete went down on the sidewalk of Maple Street, a street he'd walked every day of his life, and he did not get up on his own.
The ICE agents left shortly after the shooting. They did not render aid. They did not secure the scene. They left. The NYPD arrived afterward to a block full of traumatized residents, a man with a gunshot wound, and a lot of cell phone footage. Pete was transported to a nearby hospital. His condition has not been made public as of press time.
A REQUEST FROM THE HERALD
If you were on Maple Street on Wednesday and you have video — any video, from any angle — of what those agents did, the Brooklyn Herald would like a copy. You can bring it to our office, you can email it, you can hand it to anyone on staff. We don't care how we get it.
What happened on Maple Street was not immigration enforcement. It was assault. It was a shooting. And if there is any justice left in this city, and this paper still believes there is, stubborn as that belief gets sometimes, then the agent who pulled that trigger needs to answer for what he did. At least for the people of Maple Street. They deserve that much.