Brooklyn gang gunman who boasted of his good aim on trial for killing innocent teen, 15

A Brooklyn gang member on trial for shooting to death an innocent high-schooler he claims to have mistaken for a rival later bragged about his dead aim, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

Zidon Clarke said that “when he shoots, he gets headshots,” Brooklyn Assistant DA Matthew Perry told a Supreme Court judge in opening statements in the case.

Clarke, then 17 and a member of the Folk Nation gang, was out hunting for rival gang members to shoot and kill on Feb. 20, 2017, when he came across 15-year-old Rohan Levy and three of the teen’s friends as they walked through East Flatbush.

Clarke got out of the passenger seat of a car and shot one of Rohan’s friends in the leg, Perry said. Then he fired four more times at the fleeing group, hitting Rohan in the back of the head.

“He wasn’t going to be satisfied until somebody was dead,” Perry said. “He kept shooting again and again until Rohan’s body hit the ground.”

The idea was to make Clarke’s crew, the Super Rich Kids, or SRK, “the most dominant gang in South Brooklyn,” Perry said.

A bullet fragment entered Rohan’s brain, and the teen died three days later.

Clarke’s lawyer, Jonathan Fink, didn’t make an opening statement.

The slain teen’s mom hopes the bench trial before Judge Danny Chun will put a spotlight on gang and gun violence.

“I would like [Clarke] to be locked up for a good long time, at the very least,” said Nadine Sylvester.

“There were children playing on the street, and he shot in the middle of the day, on a warm, unseasonably warm February day,” said Sylvester. “So it’s not like it’s just a danger to me — which, obviously my son died — but he was a danger to everyone else.”

“It’s been tough,” Sylvester said of the how she and her two daughters have been coping with her son’s slaying. “There’s no prom. There’s no college. ... The promise that you think is going to happen was just taken away.”

She added, “This gang is a bigger issue in Brooklyn specifically, if you look at gun violence that’s been happening for the past couple of years. So I am looking for some justice for my son.”

Rohan was off from school for Presidents Day, putting together his résumé so he could apply for an internship at an architecture firm when he took a break to shoot some hoops with his pals.

“Rohan asked for permission to go and play basketball. I said, ‘Sure, it’s nice outside. Be back, you know, by a certain time,” his mother recalled.

After a few hours of playing basketball, the group went to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts, then started walking toward Rohan’s home.

Clarke encountered the group on E. 55th St. near Lenox Road, about a block away from where Rohan lived.

“This guy just double-parked in the street and started shooting at the boys. They didn’t even know what was happening. They were having their own conversation,” Sylvester said.

Police said shortly after the shooting that one of Rohan’s friends was wearing red and black, and the young shooter may have mistaken him for a Bloods gang member.

Video captured the shooting, and in a recording on fellow gang member Travis Laroc’s cell phone the next day, Clarke can be seen talking about the murder, Perry said.

Laroc drove the car that brought Clarke to the shooting scene, Perry said. Laroc is charged with another murder tied to the gang, and faces a separate trial.

Clarke also boasted to another gang member, who’s expected to testify at the trial, the prosecutor said.

“He bragged about being the shooter, bragged about getting a headshot, bragged about his marksman-like abilities,” Perry said.

After his arrest in April, Clarke confessed to the shooting and gave police information about his fellow gang members, Perry said.

In 2019, prosecutors in Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez’s office publicly tied Clarke to Folk Nation, when they announced the indictment of 21 of the gang’s members.

Neither Rohan nor his friends were gang members, and he steered clear of trouble, getting solid B+ grades in school and picking up his two younger sisters after class, Sylvester said.

Sylvester said she’s had to leave the neighborhood since the shooting.

“I could not live on the same street my son died,” she said. “I would have to pass it every day. It’s too much.”