EAST WILLIAMSBURG — A man was shot and killed Tuesday night inside a neighborhood playground next to a school, officials said.
Shots rang out just before 9 p.m. Tuesday from inside Martinez Playground, a bustling hangout for basketball and handball players and skateboarders located at the intersection of Stagg Walk and Manhattan Avenue, police said.
Emergency workers rushed a 28-year-old Tiquan Hamilton, who'd been shot twice in the torso, to Woodhull Hospital where he was later declared dead, officials said.
Police believe a bullet grazed a second man during the same shootout.
"I didn't think they were shots at first, I thought they were fireworks," said Henry Acosta, 20, a worker at Food Corp bodega on the corner of Manhattan Avenue and Scholes Street across from the park who heard the gunshots from inside the store. He realized they were gun shots when two dog walkers ducked into the store seeking cover.
"They got scared and they ran in here," he said.
Hamilton had 16 prior arrests in New York City, including a 2015 charge for slamming an apartment door on an officer who believed he was carrying weapons, police said.
He was also arrested and later plead guilty to burglary in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 2016 for trying to break into a man's house who chased him off with nunchucks, according to a report from local news station WFMV and court records.
Following the shooting Tuesday night another unidentified man, whose age was not released immediately, walked into Harlem Hospital with wounds from a bullet that had grazed him on the leg, police said.
The man first told authorities he'd been shot in Downtown Manhattan, but the story didn't check out, police said, and investigators are now questioning him about his involvement in the Martinez Playground shooting.
No gun was recovered at the park and no further information about the circumstances of the shooting was available immediately and an investigation is ongoing, police said.
The Martinez Playground, situated between sections of the Williamsburg Houses, is directly next the I.S. 49 school building that holds Brooklyn Latin, the Lyons Community School, The Green School and is adjacent to the Williamsburg Community Center.
