Brooklyn woman shot 6 times recalled as a ‘decent’ but troubled person: She ‘didn’t deserve this,’ aunt says

A Brooklyn woman shot six times in her building lobby by an unknown assailant was a good person whose life went bad after struggling with mental health issues, a relative said Tuesday.

Hope Staton, who had recently reporting three separate assaults from her ex-boyfriend, her cousin and a stranger, was found mortally wounded on the entryway floor of her building on Rockaway Parkway near Winthrop St. in East Flatbush at 1:17 a.m. Monday, according to police.

Medics rushed the 42-year-old woman to Brookdale University Hospital, but she could not be saved.

Her aunt, Sharron Staton, 82, told the Daily News that her troubled niece was a decent person at heart, not someone who would inspire such a violent end.

“She wasn’t mean, she wasn’t vicious — she was a struggling woman trying to make a life,” the aunt said. “It boggles the mind.”

Hope Staton grew up in Brownsville on a tightly knit Strauss Street block with two twin sisters, a brother and another sister who died just last August after battling a life-long illness, the aunt recounted.

The block was the center of family life for the Statons.

“We never used to have to take the keys out of our car when we parked,” Sharron Staton, a former public school teacher, remembered.

The aunt frequently traveled from her Park Slope home with her two young boys so they could play with their cousins. And when Staton’s mother, her sister-in-law, finally paid off the house they celebrated.

“She owned it free and clear,” the aunt said, “and she had a big mortgage-burning party.”

At 17, Hope Staton had a child who grew up with relatives in Far Rockaway, according to her aunt. She went to train to be a nursing attendant, first working upstate, then Martha’s Vineyard until finally returning to New York state. A marriage led her into trouble, according to Sharron Staton, and she was arrested for stealing.

Hope Staton returned to Strauss St. and worked in a beauty salon. “I think she was getting discouraged and depressed,” the aunt said. “And life got in the way.”

“Hope had a good heart,” the aunt said. “She would come over here and clean my house. If she had extra money, she would go grocery shopping with me. She was always helpful.”

The aunt said her niece came by her Bergen Beach home earlier in August in distress.

Hope Staton had an ex-boyfriend against whom she’d filed multiple complaints with cops, including one in March in which she said he choked her, police said. The slain woman had been arrested in 2018 for drug possession, sources said. She also has an extensive history as a domestic violence victim.

She told her aunt she was not doing well and was going to be placed soon in supportive housing for people with mental health needs through Brookdale Hospital.

“It was the first I noticed that she was different,” the aunt said. “It was a change in how she was dressing.”

Hope Staton told her beloved aunt about the struggles she was going through.

“She had a broken arm. And she had told me that somebody had hit her with a baseball bat in the park,” the aunt said. “It was some argument and it was someone she didn’t know.”

The Aug. 12 stay was quickly punctuated by a late-night drama. Sharron Staton said she woke at 1 a.m. to find fire trucks outside her building. Her niece had called them, telling her aunt that she had smelled smoke, but there clearly wasn’t any, the aunt said.

Hope Staton also was arguing with Sharron’s son, a cousin she was close with, who was also spending the night at the home. She pushed him, Sharron Stanton said. He pushed back.

Hope Staton called the police, accusing her cousin of assault. He left in a police car and Hope Staton in an ambulance.

Her aunt said she has no idea what happened to Hope afterward. But she hopes the police figure out who killed her beloved niece, who was in dire need of help.

“My niece, with all her faults, was a human being and didn’t deserve this. And she was a good person. I knew her all her life — she was not a bad person,” the aunt said.

It’s the excessive violence that bothered Sharron Staton the most.

“I want to know why somebody shot my niece six times. That’s a little much,” she said. “I can understand being shot once, or if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, but six times? To me, it’s personal to be shot six times. That’s over the top. We’re not talking John Gotti here — or Donald Trump.”