Grieving mother blames guns and loitering for son’s shooting death in Brooklyn NYCHA building

The lobbies of city housing projects like the one in Brooklyn where a 35-year-old man was shot and killed over the weekend should be off-limits to residents and visitors who just want to hang out, the victim’s mother said Monday.

Richard Reed was blasted in the chest in the lobby of a Farragut Houses building on Sands St. near Navy St. about 10 p.m. on Sunday, cops said.

Medics rushed the victim to New York-Presbyterian Hospital Brooklyn Methodist, but he could not be saved. He lived in a Farragut Houses building around the corner from the one where he was shot. There have been no arrests.

Gail Reed, 68, said she was frustrated that surveillance cameras have not yet helped police find a killer. In the meantime, she said public housing lobbies like the one near downtown Brooklyn where her only son was killed should not be places where people can congregate.

“Don’t nobody ever get caught. They have all these cameras in the projects and nobody ever gets caught,” Reed said. “They need to cut this hanging out in the lobby.”

Asked if such a rule should have also applied to her son, she replied that it should “in general.”

Although her son was likely killed by people loitering in the lobby, she said the bigger problem is the guns that are flooding every corner of the city.

She said whatever dispute that developed between her son and his killer could have probably been worked out without someone having to die.

“I’m devastated because that was my only child,” Reed said. “My only son. I’m very devastated and this is sad because … it don’t make no sense to kill each other. I’m just saying that somebody’s child, anybody’s child, shouldn’t have to to die from gun violence. Over something stupid. Why kill?”

Reed said she got the sad news from a neighbor.

“I had to call Methodist hospital to see if he was there,” she recounted. “All I heard was that the ambulance took him. They told us that we had to come to the hospital and that’s how I found out.”

Reed said her son left behind a child of his own, a 7-year-old boy who has to grow up without his father.

“He was a good person,” she remembered. “He didn’t deserve to go that way. … He had a son who I know is going to miss him very much. There’s not too much that I can say and I’m just here grieving. I’m just sorry he went that way.”

She said her son spent much of his time shuttling back and forth between her house and the home of the boy’s mother, adding that he took the boy to school and picked him up.

Cops said the victim had two arrests in 2019 for violating an order of protection and unlawful imprisonment. They did not say that the arrests had any connection to the shooting.

“He was a good man,” the mother said. ”He was not one to hang out and try to hurt anybody. He would never hurt anybody.”

Cops said the killer, who was wearing a mask, green jacket and black pants, ran off. Two shell casings were recovered from the scene.

Niquan Eidtson, 24, a friend, said the victim generally avoided confrontations and passed his time recording underground music.

“The thing about Rich, he was never that type of person,” Eidtson said. “You don’t never see him argue with nobody. That was a good person.

“Sometimes he’ll be singing on a track. Sometimes he’ll rap on it,” Eidtson recalled “He was real lyrical. More like a poet.”

In October 2022, a 37-year-old man was shot in front of the same Farragut building by a gunman who died a short time later, after going into cardiac arrest when police arrested him. That shooting victim survived.