Even in East New York, where the pop and bang of gunfire is common background noise, the shot was impossible to ignore. Emilio Batista, an unemployed warehouse worker, heard it as he lay in bed just before midnight. It was one loud shot, and it sounded like it came from something powerful. He got up to check it out. His mother was already standing at the living-room window, watching someone race down the street. From their third-floor apartment at the front of Cypress Hills Houses, Batista and his mother had a direct view of a person crumpled up on the sidewalk below, at the intersection of Sutter and Euclid avenues, next to the storefront of a Chinese takeout place that... More >>>