Murder-suicide in Flatlands leaves two dead and one injured

November 11, 2019 Noah Goldberg

A police officer stands outside the scene of a murder suicide in Flatlands Sunday Nov. 11. Eagle photo by Lloyd Mitchell

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A violent weekend that began with a public shootout in Crown Heights on Friday night ended in a tragedy in a Flatlands apartment on Sunday, when a man killed his ex-girlfriend, shot another man and then killed himself, police said Sunday.

Police responded to a call of shots fired on Sunday afternoon in an apartment on Utica Avenue around 2 p.m.

They uncovered a gruesome scene. A man and a woman, identified as Darnell Solomon and Jened Duncan, were dead with gunshot wounds to the head, police said. Another man was found with a gunshot wound to the torso. He was taken to Brookdale Hospital in critical but stable condition, according to cops.

Solomon and Duncan used to have a romantic relationship, a police spokesperson said, though she could not confirm that the other man shot was Duncan’s new boyfriend.

Solomon and Duncan both lived in the Utica Avenue apartment, which police listed as their home addresses.

Duncan was dating the other man who was shot, according to the New York Post.

Shootings and homicides are both down in the 63rd Precinct, which encompasses Flatlands. Only one person was killed in 2019, through Nov. 3, as opposed to five killed in the same period in 2018.

Another shooting incident occurred Friday evening around 9 p.m. in Crown Heights near the intersection of Kingston Avenue and Sterling Place. Two men opened fire on another man on the other side of the street. The third man returned fire. No one was injured.

Video released by police shows a man in a puffy coat firing across the street before ducking into a doorway.

The Crown Heights precinct has seen an explosive rise in shootings and killings in 2019. Already, 13 people have been killed in the neighborhood’s 77th Precinct, as opposed to just two through the same period last year. Shooting incidents are up about 25 percent in the neighborhood, and shooting victims have almost doubled, from 17 last year through Nov. 3 to 33 so far in 2019.