A shaken Flatbush community is still searching for answers days after the murder Saturday afternoon of beloved barber Warren Billings.
Billings, 38, known around town as Paul, was shot in the back of the head just before 4 p.m. in his barbershop at 2129 Cortelyou Road east of Flatbush Avenue, police said. A memorial has been erected at his shop.
It was the second murder in two weeks and the ninth this year in the 70th Precinct, which includes Flatbush, compared to seven all of last year, according to NYPD statistics.
Droves of Flatbush residents have come by the makeshift memorial outside his shuttered store to light candles, lay flowers and express their disbelief that someone would kill a man described as “a great, easy-going guy.“
“I can’t believe my baby brother is dead,” said his sister Leonie Green, “He was so humble and innocent. The sweetest human being.”
Police have provided few details about the murder, but several versions of what happened are circulating among Billings’ friends and customers.
Green, who said she is in contact with the detectives, said the shooting might be connected to a disagreement over an iPod between Billings and a customer in his 20s.
According to Green, the man may have gotten a haircut and thought he left his iPod at the shop. The man demanded Billings give it back; Billings said he did not have it.
“[Billings] got mad and told him to get out of his store,” Green said.
That was Friday. The next day, according to police, a man walked in and shot Billings in the back of the head. No evidence has come to light, however, linking the shooter to the man who argued over the iPod.
One person, who asked not to be identified, said she saw suspicious activity outside the store Friday evening.
The woman said she was coming home from church at about 6 p.m., September 30, when she saw three men arguing near Billings’ barbershop.
A young man, she said, crossed the street from the other side of Cortelyou Road near the Church of God and joined two other men. They were arguing.
“One of them said, ‘They sent me to kill him, I’m gonna kill him,’” she said.
When they saw her walk past them, the men switched from English to what sounded like Creole, the woman said.
There may also have been at least one eyewitness, according to Green. She said an employee of Billings may have been in the barbershop during the shooting, but she was not able to provide his name.
The police have made no arrests, but Green said they do have a suspect. Green said typically in this neighborhood people resist speaking to police, because of the “snitch” mentality. But in this case, police told her there has been extraordinary cooperation from the community.
By Monday, more than two-dozen candles lined the window ledge inside his shop and on the sidewalk in front of the store. A long-time friend Keya Thomas said she taped the sign to the window that read, “To my dear friend Paul who I knew for so many years why did it have to end like this? In my heart you will stay forever.”
Green said she helped raise Billings, who was the youngest of four children in their family. When she arrived at the memorial in front of Billings’ shop Monday afternoon, she sobbed almost immediately. Fellow mourners—some she knew, some she had never met—began hugging and consoling her.
Before stepping back inside a red SUV, she turned back, covered her mouth and said, “I’m never going to see my brother again, am I?”
Besides Green, Billings is survived by his 62-year-old mother two other siblings, and a nine-year-old daughter.
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