Brooklyn mom vows revenge, describes teen son’s final moments after drive-by slay
A 19-year-old man shot to death in a drive-by outside his Brooklyn home early Tuesday loved fixing cars, taking care of his family and living by the religious ideals of his devout Christian mother.
Cops said Christian Montrose was shot in the mouth and upper body outside his home on E. 104th St. near Avenue K in Canarsie about 2:40 a.m.
“I want revenge,” said Amanda Montrose, 52, the victim’s mother. “I want justice for my son. If my son was a bad son then it would’ve been fine — he lived by the sword, he died by the sword. But he didn’t live by that sword, so he shouldn’t die by that sword.”
Christian had no criminal history, according to police.
Surveillance video shows Christian sitting in his parked car when another driver pulls up and opens fire before speeding off. The wounded teen managed to get out and flee a few yards to his first-floor home, collapsing just inside.
Medics rushed him to Brookdale University Hospital, where he died.
Montrose named her youngest son “Christian” but his family called him by his biblical middle name, “Josiah.”
She said their lives were marked by religious overtones, from the hospital chapel where she learned of Christian’s death, to his plans to feed the homeless next week in the days before Easter Sunday.
But now Montrose is consumed with revenge and contempt for her son’s killer.
“I will kill him if I could see him,” Montrose said. “I just want to know why. I just want to know why. Why would they take my son’s life? Why? Why? If they wanted to shoot him, shoot him and leave him alive. Please somebody tell me this story. I want to know why. I want to know why.”
“My son wasn’t in no gang,” she added. “There are kids out there, they are thugs, kids who do all these things. My son wasn’t that. I’m not the mother on the TV who says ‘Oh my child was a good son,’ and the son was some son of a b—h. My son wasn’t that. My son was a good son. My son was a good son. It don’t make sense. It don’t make sense.”
Montrose has seen the video. Several times. Enough times to narrate her son’s final moments.
“He comes outside,” she says, as Christian arrives home in the video in his Toyota Solara convertible. “ A car pulls up. Then they start shooting. Then he gets up. He runs.”
Montrose said she was asleep when all this happened in real time.
“My room is all the way in the back so you can’t hear anything,” Montrose said. “He ran inside. My other son was there. He was on the game so he did not hear anything. He fell right here. He made it inside the house. All the blood is still inside the house. He was still alive. And his last words, I heard him say, ‘Lord have mercy.’”
Montrose rode in the front of her son’s ambulance to the hospital but after they arrived, cops took her to the chapel.
“I said, ‘Why are we going to the chapel? What’s wrong with my son?’,” she said. “They said, ‘No, no, no, nothing’s wrong with him. Let’s go to the chapel so that you have more privacy.’ I said, ‘The chapel? Why the f–k are you bringing me to the chapel if something isn’t wrong with my son? Something has to be wrong.’ And then when I reached it the doctor come and she said, ‘I’m sorry they did the best they could.’”
