A Brooklyn man on Wednesday was sentenced to 22 years in prison for firing a weapon and killing a 33-year-old man outside a deli in Brownsville.
The victim, Daishawn Benjamin, and defendant, Waajid Pierce, 48, of Brownsville, had been involved in a dispute prior to the shooting, according to Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez.
On October 27, 2021, at approximately 8:30am, Pierce walked toward a group of three men standing in front of a bodega at the corner of Belmont Avenue and Mother Gaston Boulevard in Brownsville. He took out a handgun and shot Benjamin three times. The three shots struck the victim in the torso, the arm and the hand. The defendant then fled the scene in his Infinity G35 sedan, according to prosecutors.
The investigation determined, through video surveillance and other evidence, that the defendant was the person who fired the gun at the scene. The defendant was arrested on March 2, 2022, as he was disembarking from a flight returning from Tampa, Florida to MacArthur Airport on Long Island, prosecutors said.
The victim’s brother, Kizer Williams, was killed three weeks earlier, blocks from where Daishawn Benjamin was killed. That case remains unsolved, according to Gonzalez.
“Daishawn Benjamin was shot and killed outside a neighborhood bodega in broad daylight, leaving his mother to grieve the loss of a second son to gun violence in just three weeks," Gonzalez said in a statement. "No sentence can undo that unimaginable pain, but today’s prison term holds this defendant accountable for so callously taking a life."
