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By Howard Koplowitz, Ivan Pereira and Christina Santucci

May 11, 2011

On the morning of May 14, 2010, Kedrick Ali Morrow told his mother the world would one day know his name.

Less than 24 hours later, Morrow, an 18-year-old aspiring rapper who was one month away from graduating from high school and receiving a $26,000-a-year scholarship to St. John’s University, was shot and killed at a Springfield Gardens party thrown by a friend.

His mother, Shenee Johnson, is now trying to keep his memory alive.

“It’s really been a nightmare. When you lose a child, you don’t want to live again. There are plenty of days I want to die and be depressed, but I have to get up,” Johnson said in an interview. “Never in a million years I thought he’d be dead.”

Morrow did not know the man who killed him, Johnson said, noting that her son was usually not allowed to be out past 10 p.m. For that one time she gave her son permission to spend the night at a friend’s, but from there he went on to the party in Springfield Gardens.

By 10:30 p.m., he had not called his worried mother to check in. In the early hours of May 15, Morrow was taken to Jamaica Hospital, where doctors said he died from a gunshot wound.

Faceless victims

Morrow was one of the 43 people murdered in southeast Queens during 2010 — a disturbingly high percentage of the 100 homicides in the borough last year.

Most of the victims were young, and 22 were black men under the age of 32, according to the NYPD’s crime reports.

Their abbreviated lives and sudden deaths were covered in brief news stories or even shorter police blotter items, but all too often they were nameless and then forgotten by the public — just numbers added to the weekly homicide count.

No arrests have been made in 25 out of the 43 homicides in the three police precincts covering southeast Queens — the 103rd, 105th and 113th, according to a list compiled by TimesLedger Newspapers based on information from police and relatives of the victims.

Four victims were killed in murder-suicides, and in another case, the killer acted in self-defense, the authorities said.

Several of the victims were cut down in broad daylight, like 26-year-old Tony McFadden, who was shot in the head when he opened his door in St. Albans on Oct. 10, 2010.

The homicides have taken a heavy toll in the communities where they occurred and silenced residents who refuse to work with police investigators.

The TimesLedger staff spent three months gathering information about the murder victims and determining the status of their cases.

The authorities did not release the identities of at least 10 of the victims to the media immediately after their deaths. The newspaper also found there were arrests and arraignments in seven of the murders even though the police had not issued updates on the cases.

Random violence, robberies gone wrong, suspected drug-related shootings and gang activity all played a part in the final homicide total for Jamaica, St. Albans, Camrbia Heights, Queens Village, Laurelton, Brookville, Springfield Gardens, Hollis, New Hyde Park, Bellerose and Rosedale.

But the newspaper wanted to tell the stories behind that staggering number of 43 — of mostly young lives blown away on largely middle-class streets and the family members left behind still trying to preserve the victims’ dreams.

Morrow, who shared his dreams with his mother that May morning, never had a chance to live up to his ambitions of being a rapper, doctor or lawyer. Instead his mother had to plan his funeral.

Just six minutes by car, or 1.2 miles from where Morrow was gunned down, the body of another murder victim, 24-year-old Jamaica resident Demika Moore, was discovered July 23, 2010.

Police are not sure where Moore was killed or who murdered her. Her family feared the worst when they heard that the body of a young woman with a similar tattoo was found in St. Albans six months after Moore had disappeared.

Moore’s aunt, Leticia Moore-Jackson, said the young mother had short-term memory problems stemming from a car accident 5 1/2 years earlier. Moore would on occasion leave home for long spells without letting her loved ones know where she was.

“I think her injuries led her to meeting the wrong person,” she said.

Disturbing trends

Although in most cases the killers still have not been identified, trends can be found among the southeast Queens murders.

In 2010, more of the murder victims were killed on a Monday — a total of 11 — than on any other day. Wednesdays were the quietest in terms of homicides, with only two recorded.

The most common cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head, which accounted for 16 murders. Of the remaining 27 homicides, only eight did not involve guns.

The homicide statistics also showed that despite popular belief, there were more murders in the winter and fall — 13 apiece — than there were in the summer (10) or spring (seven).

Of the 25 unsolved cases, only two people — Demika Moore and Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax — were not killed by guns.

The open cases reflect in part the unwillingness of witnesses to cooperate with the 103rd and 113th precincts, which cover most of southeast Queens, according to the heads of their two precinct community councils, which are made up of civilian volunteers who act as liaisons between the precinct’s officers and residents.

The president of the 105th Precinct council did not return repeated calls for comment.

“A lot of residents are scared. The young people have guns out here, and they don’t want to get involved,” said Vivian McMillian, president of the 113th Precinct Community Council. “After a shooting, they’ll go back in and close the door and make like nothing is happening.”

Last year was not the deadliest year on record for murders in the area — that distinction goes to 1990, when there were 105 reported homicides in the three precincts, according to NYPD stats. But 2010 saw a surge in murders in each from the previous year.

In 2010 the NYPD reported 49 murders occurred in the three southeast Queens precincts, up from 32 in 2009.

A spokesman for the Police Department said its homicide rate last year was higher than the 43 tracked by TimesLedger because NYPD included victims who died in 2010 from injuries sustained in crimes in earlier years.

The 103rd Precinct, which covers the neighborhoods of Jamaica, Hollis Park Gardens, Hollis and Lakewood, had 11 murders last year, based on information compiled by the TimesLedger. In 2009 there were 11 murders, according to official police crime statistics

The 105th Precinct, which extends through Springfield Gardens, Laurelton, Rosedale, Cambria Heights, Queens Village, Bellerose, Glen Oaks, New Hyde Park and Floral Park — the city’s second-largest in terms of land area — had 16 homicides in 2010, seven more than the NYPD number for 2009. Three of the 2010 homicides were part of a murder-suicide and police classified another case as a Brooklyn homicide even though the body was found in Queens.

The 113th Precinct, which includes St. Albans, Hollis, Springfield Gardens, South Ozone Park, South Jamaica, Addisleigh Park and Rochdale Village, recorded 16 murders last year compared to NYPD’s total of 12 in 2009.

Donna Clopton, president of the 103rd Precinct Community Council and a Jamaica resident, said the surge in murders caught everyone in the community by surprise — even police.

“There was a point where the kids at IS 8 were afraid to go home. There were a lot of shootings happening near there around the same time,” she said.

Culture of violence

The two precinct council heads said the escalation in shootings could be traced to a rise in gang activity and more people turning to violence to resolve their problems.

The gang problem not only includes the more infamous groups such as the Bloods and Crips, which have been operating in the neighborhood for years, but also pocket groups that have been created among friends with the help of social networks, according to Clopton.

“In order to survive in today’s environment, you have to act tough, and it’s sad,” she said.

In several of the murders last year in southeast Queens, small arguments quickly escalated into full-blown confrontations, which in turn led to the angry person getting a weapon and using it to shoot another person, according to investigators.

It was not known how many victims actually knew their killers.

Some met their demise while attending late-night parties that were promoted through Facebook, Twitter and word of mouth.

Robinson Lajeunesse, 19, and Dane Freeman, 20, both of Cambria Heights, were killed in shootings that erupted at those parties during the summer.

McMillian said some residents have abandoned all sense of civility and are too quick to reach for a firearm to settle scores.

“It’s like the Wild Wild West out here,” she said.

The random violence has shattered long-held notions of safety in the area, the community council heads said.

Eyewitnesses, neighbors, friends and other people who have some connection to the various homicides are sometimes reluctant to assist the authorities on the cases, the council leaders said, because those with what may be pertinent information fear retaliation from the suspects and their associates.

This unwillingness to step forward has made it extremely difficult for investigators to crack cases and left the community with a sense of that the killers may never be caught.

Clopton recalled that during a murder investigation in 2009, a teen gave investigators information that led to an arrest in a gang-related murder. But when the teen tried to get some of his peers to do the same, they not only shunned the police but looked down on the cooperative teen as a snitch.

“No other kids wanted to talk, and that was a hard lesson I learned,” she said.

McMillian, who has served on the community council for more than 20 years, said she has seen a growing reluctance on the part of potential witnesses to co-operate with the authorities. Neighbors simply do not want any involvement with the murders, even if someone was killed right outside their doorstep, she said.

“Some people say, ‘Oh, they’re just doing it to themselves, it doesn’t affect us,'” she said.

Perhaps the most frustrated with the stalled investigations are the victims’ relatives, such as Lystra Huggins. Her brother, Leslie, was murdered during a break-in at his Queens Village home in February 2010 and the killers have not been arrested.

The New Jersey resident said her sibling moved to the house on Francis Lewis Boulevard to make a better life for his family, and she feels heartbroken every time police tell her there are no updates in the investigation.

“I don’t want it to be a cold case,” she said.

Ian MacFarland contributed to this story.