The night the Knicks won the championship, the whole city was told to celebrate. On Lincoln Road in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, the celebration ended with a 44-year-old father of four shot to death a few steps from his own front door.
Emanuel Spencer was at a block party on Lincoln Road, between Flatbush and Bedford Avenues, watching the game like everyone else, when gunfire broke out. Police got a 911 call around 11:40 p.m. on Saturday, June 13, reporting a man shot at the party, according to the NYPD and NBC New York. Officers found Spencer with multiple gunshot wounds. He was rushed to the hospital in critical condition and died of his injuries.
He was not a bystander to some far-off violence. He was home. The block party was on his own block, and the people around him were neighbors.
“His day was going good,” his younger brother told the New York Daily News. “Everybody was just watching the basketball game, relaxing.” There was no warning, no buildup that the family saw coming, just a good day that turned into a homicide between one possession and the next.
For days, every outlet in the city ran the same championship story: the parade, the keys to the city, the orange and blue confetti. Spencer’s killing ran underneath all of it, a Brooklyn father of four dead on a residential street, and it barely registered against the noise of a sports celebration. The joy was citywide and televised. The death was local and quiet.
As of now, the case is open. No arrests have been made, and police are still trying to establish a motive, according to the Brooklyn Eagle. That means whoever fired the shots on Lincoln Road that night is, for the moment, still out there, and a family in Prospect Lefferts Gardens is planning a funeral instead of talking about a basketball game.
The NYPD is asking anyone with information about the shooting to come forward. Tips can be submitted anonymously to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS, and they can be made in any language. In a case with no arrest and no clear motive, a neighbor who saw something is often the difference between a closed file and an open one.
