A wall by the park at the Garden Street apartments where a 16-year-old girl was shot to death Sunday. The alleged shooter appeared in court Monday.
Neighbor Tenia Howell (with son Randy Jr.): “Life is crazy” in the neighborhood.
Nineteen-year-old Golda “smiled” and “laughed” as she told police how she pointed “Little G,” her .380-caliber handgun, at her 16-year-old friend Jamese and pulled the trigger. She thought the safety was on. It wasn’t.
That’s what led to a deadly scene inside a Garden Street apartment, according to a police report released Monday.
Police arrested Golda and charged her with accidentally shooting her friend Jamese Hudson to death in the apartment Sunday.
Golda — the nickname of a girl whose boyfriend was shot to death at the same address in March, allegedly by a Bloods gang member — fled the scene of the shooting. Hudson’s relatives caught up with her in Newhallville and beat her; the cops arrived and took her to the police station. There Golda confessed, according to police.
She is being held in lieu of $1 million bail. A judge ordered her Monday to be kept on suicide watch. The charges: manslaughter in the first degree with a firearm; carrying a pistol without a permit; unlawful discharge of a firearm.
According to a police report of the incident prepared by Detective Michael Wuchek:
Golda and Hudson were hanging out in Golda’s second-floor bedroom Sunday afternoon in the apartment on Garden Street where Golda lives with, among others, her mother and her aunt. The apartment is part of a series of two-story homes set back from Garden near Dwight Street; it’s part of the sprawling Kensington Square apartment complex in the Dwight neighborhood.
It was around 1:45 p.m. Another member of the household dozed off on a couch on the first floor of the apartment after hearing the girls “giggling” upstairs, according to the report. Then a loud gunshot woke her up. Golda “ran down the stairs and said, ‘I just shot Jamese by accident. I got to go.’” Then Golda fled.
Jamese lay in her blood upstairs, shot in the face.
At 3:19 p.m. police arrived at a “large fight” at Winchester Avenue and Read Street. “A large group” was “assaulting” Golda. Medics treated Golda on the scene. Then, at police headquarters, she gave police her statement.
She reportedly described how she and Jamese regularly played with the handgun “Little G,” which Golda has owned for about six months. She had bought it after a member of the Bloods gang, which is active in the neighborhood, allegedly shot her boyfriend to death in the lot right outside the apartment in March.
Golda “stated that she put the safety on and pointed the gun at Jamese and when she pulled the trigger, the gun went off shooting Jamese in the face.”
At that point, Golda “got scared and got dressed and left.” She asked other members of the house to get an ambulance. “She said she did not call 911 because her phone has a GPS in it and she did not want to get tracked. She said she called her boyfriend … and told him she is coming over and that she is in trouble. She took the .380 caliber handgun with her. She said she gave [the boyfriend] the handgun in his basement bedroom located on Gibbs St. She changed her clothes, showered and left …”
The police report describes how Golda “showed no emotion or remorse (she smiled, laughed and joked) during the entire interview … When asked if she understood the severity of Jamese’s injuries, she said ‘she’s dead right?’”
Welcome To The Neighborhood
Police kept the apartment blocked off Monday as a crime scene.
Quita Robertson lives in the apartment next door to Golda’s on Garden Street. She was coming home from church Sunday afternoon around 3 p.m. “As soon as I got off the bus, I saw a whole lot of cops,” she recalled Monday morning.
As shocking as the event was, Robertson wasn’t totally surprised: Just the prior weekend she had called police to report gunshots being fired from that apartment around 3 or 4 a.m. “It sounded like it was in the air. I knew it was gunshots. It terrified me.”
Robertson said trouble happened in that apartment all the time. As well as in the surrounding area.
Robertson moved to the apartment from Norwalk earlier this year. “This is the second [homicide] that happened here” already, she said. “I work and stay home. I barely come out.”
Now she wants to move. “It’s very scary living here. I have a child” who’s 18 months old, Robertson said. “My next move is getting out of here. I never lived like this before in my life. I don’t deserve to live like this.”
Another neighbor, Tenia Howell (pictured at the top of the story), moved several doors down in the same complex in June with her young son. She came from Rosette Street in the Hill. The shooting didn’t faze her. “it’s just like Rosette,” she said. “Same thing — the shooting, the killing. Life is crazy.”
A woman who lives across the street, who declined to give her name, said she knows Golda’s family; he daughter went to Roberto Clemente School with Golda. The woman said she works in the neighborhood as well.
“A lot of the kids I work with — a lot of teenagers hang out [in Golda’s apartment] that don’t actually live in the neighborhood,” the woman said. She said Golda’s aunt, the head of the household, is often out of the house caring for an elderly mother in a convalescent home.
“It’s tragic,” she said of the shooting. “It’s not only one life lost, but two. The girl who shot her will have to do time.”
An older cousin of Jamese, former Hill Alderman Tony Dawson, expressed frustration over the continued problems at the apartment, which he said formed a backdrop to the shooting. “Anything and everything is going on in that house,” he said. “That house has been like that the last two or three years. Everybody in the neighborhood knew what was going on.”
Lt. John Velleca, who is in charge of the investigation, said Monday afternoon that he knows of “no connection” between the young women involved in the incident and the Bloods. He also said that “we don’t think” Golda “had a role” in the murder of her boyfriend back in March.
17 year old girl playing with a gun?